How do you make beer in Manor Lords?
As you grow Landlords town and upgrade your burglar plots, you will need more stuff to keep your villagers happy. One of those things is beer (and a tavern to drink in).
Us Landlords Ale Guide explains all the steps to making your own beer – growing barley, malting barley and brewing beer – and how to distribute it in a tavern. We also explain how to import beer (or its ingredients) into a trading post.
Why you need beer in Manor Lords
When you Landlords village starts, all you have to do is give your villagers access to a spring to drink from. Once it grows – when it’s time to upgrade your burglary plots to level 3 and take your town to a small village – you’ll need to supply them with ale also.
Making beer – and keeping your town’s tavern supplied with it – is a strangely intense process. You will have to grow barley on a farm, have a malting active, convert a burglary plot (level 2) to a breweryand have one manned tavern. If you don’t have fertile land to grow barley (or just don’t want to), you’ll have to set up a trade route.
It’s a lot to manage, so let’s go through each step below.
Farm barley
Growing barley works just like growing any other crop; we have a more detailed guide to remodeling here. First you need to find a good spot with the barley fertility overlay – actually yellow or green everywhere. Then it’s time to set up some plots.
There are a few considerations when laying out your plots on the property. First, consider that a family can care for approximately 0.6 morgen of fields per year. Second, you will need to rotate your crops to maintain fertility. That’s why we recommend that you create three small plots (about 0.3 morgen each) and leave one fallow each year. It doesn’t sound like much, but this is enough barley to at least get your beer industry going.
If you’ve set up a farm, all you have to do is wait for fall, when the barley is harvested and can be processed into…
Turn barley into malt in a malting house
Once you harvest barley, you will need a new, self-contained building to process it. a malting (4 wood) does just that; you will have to assign a family to the job.
A malting house will be running 1 barley in 1 malt. From there it goes to a brewery.
Build a brewery on a burglary plot (level 2)
Once you upgrade a Burglary Plot to Level 2, you’ll unlock a number of new expansions for the Backyard Industry. One of these is a brewery (5 regional resources, 5 planks). Take breweries 1 malt and make 1 beer from it.
The only note here is that converting a burglary lot into a brewery turns all the families living there into artisans – meaning they can’t do any other work and they are removed from the labor pool of unassigned families.
Frustrating, that ale is not enough in itself. Ale itself is just one product and is stored in your brewery’s pantry and then in your city’s granary. To benefit your city – and, more importantly, to ensure it meets the requirements for a Level 2 Burglary Plot, you need a tavern.
Build a tavern
a tavern (5 wood) is where beer becomes useful. It takes (at least) one assigned family to move the beer from the Granary to the Inn, where it can be distributed to the town. That’s what will ultimately satisfy your burglary plots’ (and your city’s) requirement for one tavern offer – a tavern with a constant supply of beer.
As your town grows, you’ll likely need to add more barley fields (and farms), assign more families to the malting house, and maybe even add a second brewery.
However, at any point in this supply chain you can always…
Build a trading post to import barley, malt or beer
Sometimes you start your game Landlords in a region with terrible fertility (barley seems particularly fickle) and that means you have to do a lot of extra work to not get enough barley. In cases like these, it’s time to import supplies trade.
a trading post (4 wood) Allows you to import and export goods traveling merchants. Trade costs regional wealth to import and earns regional wealth when you export.
In a trading post’s menu, you can designate a family to work there and then switch to the Trading tab. Here you can check all available goods (construction, crops, food, materials, raw materials and military) and decide to import, export or trade them completely (import or export) until you have the surplus you set.
For beer, you can import barley from the Crops tab for 12 regional resources, malt from the Crafting Materials tab for 14 regional resources each, or beer from the Raw Materials tab for 18 regional resources each. Ale requires you to do that establish a trade route – basically just pay some regional wealth to have a traveling trader visit your trading post on a regular schedule, rather than randomly.
Keep in mind that importing the ingredients for beer is very expensive, so you’ll need to have a fairly healthy export business at the same time to support this.