Beer production - from the view of a brewer

In game, beer is made of firewood, water, wheat and honey.

But in real, that gives braggot - a mix of beer and mead.

That’s not beer.

Mostly I have toooooo much herbs.

Beer is in real made of fire wood(for boiling the wort and heating the water also for malting and kilning), cereals(mostly barley, could be added?), wheat or rye and herbs, for preservation and taste.

Can the game developer change it to a more realistic process: firewood, water, wheat/rye(or adding barley, grows on light sandy soils, no difficult growing conditions) and herbs?

Also it makes sense to store beer in wooden casks - so you need casks for making beer.

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It really depends on the proportions of honey. Ol’ British Honey Ale is still a beer :slight_smile:

Also remember that this isn’t a game depicting real life medieval/colonial. It’s a fantasy world so things might be different there to what happens on Earth. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I mean also for game balance it would be better to use herbs instead of honey.

He’s got a good point here though. Why shouldn’t barrels be required for producing beer? After all we visibly see the beer stored in barrels outside of the pub. Instead of beer being a unit of 1 (the glass), it could be a beer barrel equivalent to say, 30 servings, at the pub.

I also agree that herbs should be an ingredient for beer, if only to give them additional useful applications in our towns. Barley as a cereal grain is also a worthy idea, to give the brewers a specialty crop like weavers have flax. And also useful as animal feed.

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what to do with all this honey?!!
I think the developers tried to incorporate a new resource needed to produce something.
Why not mead instead of beer? this could upgrade the tavern to level 2 and offer inn services.

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I mean, to be beer you would also have to grow hops, or else it will be ale (which spoils after several days, meaning instead of pubs it’s served in the house of whoever brewed recently and made excess)

I don’t know that much about Medieval beers, but I read an academic article some time ago about some of the ancient beer ‘recipes’ they’ve extracted from analysis of residue in beer containers, and they include ingredients we don’t normally associate with ‘beer’ any more: fruits, vegetables, spices, etc. First mention of beer made using wheat and barley is from 11,000 BCE in the middle east, and first mention of using hops is actually from 822 CE, by a Carolingian Abbot, and it was replacing ‘gruit’, a mixture of herbs they had used up until then.
Which basically means the Developers can use just about anything on the map to make ‘beer’ and probably be correct somewhere, sometime!

Well, you can make beer literally of any veggie/fruit. It won’t be “beery” but technically it will still be a beer.

So, for now, in the game we are probably stuck with Beery, Beerish, or Beeroid instead of Beer.

Think they’ll change the proper entries in the UI before Release?

Basic beer brewing- grain (I personally like a wheat beer) and mead from honey.
Upgraded brewing- a fermenter, and rye, to make whiskey. Casks from oak (from Cooper, implies more than one barrel type can be made) to age whiskey 5 years. Scotch can only be made on maps which have swamps for peat.

Would be nice to have beer and whiskey regardless of ingredients. Beer drunk villagers could then become unenjoyable and unproductive nuisances. Upside, increases revenue. Downside, decreased production. Whiskey drunk villagers would be the ones to go on violent rampages. Upside, none. These jerks don’t pay there tab. Downside, decreased population. (Would also be kind of cool if some of our excess herbs were of the smoke-able kind and our villagers got the munchies and went on eating rampages. Upside, increased market revenue. Downside, decreased food supplies.)

We could go crazy with variations on alcoholic beverages, because people have been brewing, distilling, fermenting booze since the Neolithic. But here are a few inputs from IRL:
The wooden barrel was invented as a storage container as far back as 2000 BCE, but the ‘modern’ concave, hooped barrel was apparently invented in Switzerland (‘alpine Gaul’ says Pliny the Elder) about 300 BCE, and by about 75 BCE Pliny divides barrels into three types: ordinary shipping or storage barrels, wine barrels, and large casks used for storage only. Pliny also says that each type was made by a different set of coopers, with different skills.

The first evidence of distilled ‘aqua vitae’, or whiskey, is from Scotland in 1405 CE - late, but still Medieval!

So, we could theoretically have different Cooperages making different barrels for different purposes, including whiskey, wine, or beer storage and regular goods storage, and a Distillery making whiskey or some other distilled alcohol (distilled wine = brandy, distilled wheat = vodka, etc). Building a distillery should require a new Raw Material, though: copper for distillation piping and a still, but that, like initial cattle, goats, horses and chickens, could be available from Trade only - and then if your Distillery’s product becomes famous as Old Staggerhead Whiskey you could make a bundle selling it back to the Traders by the specialized shipping Cask . . .

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