How to make ale, cider and mead

Ale is the first luxury most Manor Lords villages need, and the chain that makes it trips up a lot of players: barley has to be grown, malted, brewed and then handed out by a tavern that has someone working in it. This guide covers the whole chain as of version 0.8.104 (Update 8), plus cider and mead, which Update 8 added as alternatives brewed in the same building.

Who drinks, and how much

Families living in level 2 and higher burgage plots drink 1 beverage every 3 months, so each of those families gets through 4 a year. Level 1 families stopped drinking in Update 7, which means a village of fresh level 1 plots needs no ale at all. The demand only starts when you upgrade.

That makes the sum easy. Count your level 2, 3 and 4 families and multiply by 4 for a year. Twenty level 2 families plus six level 3 families is 26 drinkers, so 104 ale a year, or about 26 per season. The food, fuel and ale calculator does this for you and turns it into barley, apples or honey.

Step 1: barley in the fields

Barley has been a spring crop since Update 6, so you sow it in spring and harvest it with the rest of your crops. Since Update 8 it shares a fertility pool with oats, so a field that grew barley last year is drained for oats as well. The field planner flags rotations that hit the same pool two years running. The farmhouse threshes barley like any other crop and keeps it in its own storage until someone collects it.

How much barley one field gives depends on its size, its fertility and your farm workers, and the developers stopped publishing fixed yields in Update 5. Plan from the demand side: every ale needs exactly 1 barley, so 104 ale is 104 barley.

Step 2: the malthouse

The malthouse costs 2 timber, 6 planks and 12 rubble stone on the official wiki, takes up to 2 families and turns 1 barley into 1 malt. It also burns 1 fuel a month, which people forget: a malthouse that runs out of firewood stops. Set a fuel stockpile in its panel. Over a year that is 12 fuel, which is worth adding to your winter plan.

The workers fetch barley from granaries or farmhouses themselves and keep the malt in the malthouse's pantry (100) until granary workers pick it up. Build it between your farmhouse and your brewery plots so those walks are short.

Step 3: the brewery

The brewery is not a separate building. It is a backyard extension on a burgage plot, and the family living there becomes the brewer. The official wiki lists it as a level 2 extension. It turns 1 malt into 1 ale. Since Update 8 the same brewery can also make:

• Cider from apples, at 4 apples per cider. Apples come from orchard extensions and are picked in September.
• Mead from honey, at 1 honey per mead. Apiaries are seasonal since Update 8: they build up yield through spring and summer and are harvested in autumn, and the meadow around them sets how much they give.

Update 8 also replaced the old "production focus" with active recipes. Artisans start with no active recipes, so a new brewery does nothing until you open it and tick the drink you want. This is the most common reason a fresh brewery sits idle.

Step 4: the tavern

The tavern does not brew. It stores drinks and hands them out to the burgage plots. A small tavern costs 3 timber and 4 planks on the wiki, has 1 workplace and stores 15 ale. The large tavern upgrade (2 timber, 8 planks, 10 stone) adds 2 workplaces and raises storage to 50.

Two Update 8 rules matter here. Families only drink the beverage type their tavern is handing out, and they will not drink at a tavern with no assigned workers. A tavern full of ale with nobody working in it does nothing.

Worked example: 26 drinking families

Drink	Per year	Raw input per year
Ale	104	104 barley, then 104 malt, plus 12 fuel for one malthouse
Cider	104	416 apples
Mead	104	104 honey

Cider costs four times as much raw input as ale, so it suits a village with spare orchards rather than one short on everything. Mead is the cheapest per unit, but apiaries only pay out once a year, so you need the honey stored by winter.