How to make ale in Manor Lords

As you grow your Manor Lords town and upgrade your burgage plots, you’ll start to need more stuff to keep your villagers happy. One of those things is ale (and a tavern to drink in).

Our Manor Lords ale guide will explain all the steps to making your own ale — farming barley, making barley into malt, and brewing ale — and how to distribute it at a tavern. We’ll also explain how to import ale (or its ingredients) at a trading post.

Why you’ll need ale in Manor Lords

When your Manor Lords village starts out, you’ll only need to give your villagers access to a well to drink from. Once it grows — when it’s time to upgrade your burgage plots to level 3 and get your town to a Small Village — you’ll need to supply them with ale as well.

Making ale — and keeping your town’s tavern supplied with it — is an oddly intense process. You’ll have to grow barley on a farm, have a malthouse running, convert a burgage plot (level 2) to a brewery, and have a staffed 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

Farming barley works just like farming any other crop — we’ve got a more detailed guide for farming here. First, you’ll need to find a good spot with the barley fertility overlay — basically anywhere yellow or green. Then, it’s time to set up a few plots.

There’s a couple considerations when laying out your farm field plots. First, remember that a family can tend to about 0.6 morgen of field per year. Second, you’ll have to rotate your crops to keep the fertility up — which is why we recommend making three small plots (about 0.3 morgen each) and keeping one fallow each year. It doesn’t sound like much, but this is enough barley to at least get your ale industry started.

With a farm set up, you’ll just have to wait for autumn when the barley is harvested and can be turned into…

Turn barley into malt at a malthouse

Once you’ve got barley being harvested, you’ll need a new standalone building to process it. A malthouse (4 timber) does just that; you’ll have to assign a family to the job.

A malthouse will turn 1 barley into 1 malt. From there, it’ll head to a brewery.

Build a brewery at a burgage plot (level 2)

Once you upgrade a burgage plot to level 2, you’ll unlock a bunch of new extensions for its backyard industry. One of these is a brewery (5 Regional Wealth, 5 planks). Breweries take 1 malt and turn it into 1 ale.

The only note here is that converting a burgage plot to a brewery converts all of the families living there into artisans — meaning they can’t work any other jobs and they’re removed from the unassigned families labor pool.

Frustratingly, that ale isn’t enough on its own. Ale by itself is just a commodity and gets stored in your brewery’s pantry and then your town’s granary. To be of use to your town — and, more importantly, to make it satisfy a level 2 burgage plot’s requirement, you’ll need a tavern.

Build a tavern

A tavern (5 timber) is where that ale becomes useful. It’ll need (at least) one family assigned to it to move the ale from the granary to the tavern, where it can be distributed to the town. That is what will finally fulfill your burgage plots’ (and your town’s) requirement for a tavern supply — a tavern with a steady supply of ale.

As your town grows, you’ll probably need to add more barley fields (and farms), assign more families to the malthouse, and maybe even add a second brewery.

At any point in this supply chain, though, you can always just…

Build a trading post to import barley, malt, or ale

Sometimes, you’ll start your game of Manor Lords in a region with terrible fertility — barley seems especially fickle — and that means you’d have to put in a ton of extra work to get not enough barley. In cases like this, it’s time to import supplies through trade.

A trading post (4 timber) allows you to import and export goods through traveling merchants. Trade costs Regional Wealth to import and earns Regional Wealth when you export.

In a trading post’s menu, you can assign a family to work there and then you can switch over to the Trade tab. This is where you can check all of the available goods — construction, crops, food, materials, commodities, and military — and decide to import, export, or full trade (either import or export) them until you have the surplus you set.

For ale, you can import barley from the Crops tab for 12 Regional Wealth, malt from the Crafting Materials tab for 14 Regional Wealth each, or ale from the Commodities tab for 18 Regional Wealth each. Ale requires you to establish a trade route — basically just pay out some Regional Wealth to make a traveling merchant visit your trading post on a regular schedule, rather than randomly.

Just keep in mind that importing any of the ingredients for ale is really expensive, so you’ll need to have a pretty healthy export business happening at the same time to support it.