The Mash Tun is the first step of the brewery, and its whole job is concentration: it turns high-starch material into high-sugar material so the fermentor has something worth eating.
You can skip it and ferment grain directly. You will simply never reach the same alcohol.
What a batch needs
Craft through the in-world HUD or the web page version on the meter website. Solids top left, liquids bottom left, recipes along the top, enzymes on the right.
Three requirements, and the second one stops most people:
- At least 10 units of liquid.
- An enzyme. Barley, currently the only one. Without it there is no craft button at all — nothing converts the starch, so there is nothing to make.
- No more than 1,000 starch in a batch. That is the ceiling, and it is what limits how much you can add.
Raw crops beat your own mashes, deliberately
This surprises people, so it is worth stating plainly.
Ten raw potatoes give roughly twice the starch and sugar of one potato mash you made yourself.
That penalty is intentional: it keeps raw materials worth growing rather than everyone brewing from processed goods.
So why use your own recipes at all? Two reasons:
- They carry their other stats. A mash built from ingredients with health, energy or thirst on them passes those through into the drink. Raw potato carries almost nothing.
- They are yours. A named recipe is proprietary — nobody else has it.
Use raw crops for raw strength; use your own mashes when the drink needs to do something.
Colour
The mash’s colour comes from its ingredients and cannot be set. If you want a vivid mash, put vividly coloured things in it. It is not the final colour anyway — fermentation will change it again.
Time, and the change you may have missed
An hour a batch, and you earn 100 crafting experience the moment you start rather than when you collect.
You no longer have to sit there. The old sit-ball is gone: start the mash and walk away, exactly as you would in a real brewhouse.
Where it goes
To the Fermentor, and after that as far as you care to take it — the Distillery to strengthen it, the Aging Barrels to improve it, the Bottling Station to sell it.
The tun itself
Fully modifiable and only one prim, so it links neatly into your own build — make it invisible and attach your own mesh if the look does not suit your sim.