Brewing

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“ Beer may cause you to digress--and lead a happier life. ”

Guide based on the 0.D (Danny) version of Cataclysm DDA, 
Some of the information present here might not apply to future or past versions.

Many of the recipes in crafting alcohol and beer in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead are undocumented because they do not have direct crafting steps through the crating screen, but are supported by fermentation and time. The booze crafting steps in CDDA take a unique turn on the crafting system we are all familiar with and it may seem a little daunting because of the uniqueness. This guide aims to shed some light on alcohol crafting in CDDA to help the budding apocalyptic brewer.

Tools of the Trade

The tools you will need to brew are on a short list. Only the fruit wine must can be brewed with quality 1 brewing in the chemistry set; all other recipes that can craft into ethanol will need quality 2 from a still.

• Still
• Nearby fire or any of the many other heat sources
• A tool with boiling quality 2
• Fermenting Vat built in the construction menu

Brew Crafting Flowchart

This flowchart is a crafting flow for the ingredients needed to make the different kinds of alcohol. When you craft these items they are called wort, must, or mash depending the ingredients. These are brewing terms for the sugary or starchy soup that feeds your yeast in fermentation to make the delicious booze.

The light blue sections are crafted in the crafting screen like most CDDA items, but the gray middle part is where you ferment your wort, must, or mash in the Fermenting Vat. Simply have a container ready for the must, wort, or mash when it is crafted, examine the built vat with the wort, mash, or must in your inventory, and follow the prompts. When you return to your vat once the fermenting is complete have a container ready to collect your finished alcohol.

The setup takes some liberty here as, for example, a still is not used in crafting beer outside of CDDA, but for the game's purposes this is how New New England gets drunk:

the booze must flow. Note: Cheap wine must is no longer craftable

Yeasties and Other Small Things

Yeasties

To grow your supply of yeast you first need to find at least one in the game. From there you can propagate your cultures by crafting a sealed yeast culture, allowing it time to grow in your inventory or on the ground, and activating it to harvest more yeast. As long as you do not forget to use (or fail the craft for) your last yeast portion you can continue to grow your initial supply as needed.

Other Fermentables

There are other fermentables you can load in your fermentation vat that do not require a still. Here is a complete list of things with the "BREW" tag which can be loaded for fermentation which includes cheese, vinegar, and other alcohols that cannot resolve to ethanol:

Search the json files for the 'brewable' tag. As an example the '"whiskey wort' brewable part looks like this:

       "brewable" : {
           "time" : 7200,
           "results" : [ "wash_whiskey", "yeast" ]
       }

BioDiesel

Your alcohol stores a lot of chemical energy and can be converted to ethanol and then further crafted into biodiesel fuel. While it isn't an easy process, this may be worth the effort, because, besides actual renewables like solar power and muscle power, diesel is the only other renewable vehicle fuel resource in the game and has some notable benefits in power over the other two. It is worth mentioning it is not likely that crafted diesel will be an early game source of the fuel, but somewhat mid or later game due to the resources needed.

If you are interested in creating renewable diesel, then moonshine appears to be the most efficient for your time and resources!