How to Install and Configure the Brewery Plugin in Minecraft

What the Brewery Plugin Adds

Vanilla Minecraft eventually runs dry on multiplayer entertainment, which is where Brewery steps in. The plugin lets players craft a wide catalogue of drinks, most of them alcoholic, that apply status effects mimicking various levels of intoxication. Vision warps, the screen darkens around the edges, your character stumbles, and after enough rounds your chat messages become unreadable scribble. Log off while heavily drunk and your character might briefly refuse to reconnect, claiming it cannot find the way back.

Everything is configurable. You can disable the disruptive bits, balance the recipes, or invent entirely new drinks with custom names, effects, and chat messages. The setup process is straightforward once you know where to upload the files, so the rest of this guide walks through downloading, installing, configuring, and troubleshooting Brewery on a HolyHosting server.

Downloading the Plugin

Grab the latest release from Spigot's resource page before touching the server.

• Open the Brewery plugin listing on the Spigot website.
• Click the Download Now button in the upper right.

• Save the JAR file somewhere you can find it again, like your desktop or a dedicated plugins folder on your machine.

Installing Brewery on the Server

Before uploading anything, the server needs a plugin-compatible jar selected. Brewery requires Spigot or Paper (Purpur also works). Pick one of those from the version selector in your panel and restart the server so the necessary directories are generated. Once the plugins folder exists, follow these steps.

• From your HolyHosting control panel, click File Manager in the upper left.

• Enter your password and press Login to open the file browser.

• Open the `plugins` folder and click Upload in the top left corner.
• Drag and drop the Brewery JAR into the upload zone.

• Wait for the progress bar to reach 100%, return to the main panel, and restart the server.

When the server comes back online, the plugin generates its own folder with the default configuration inside.

First Steps as a Player

Making drinks requires a handful of common ingredients plus a few that take more effort to gather. You also need brewing infrastructure: a cauldron with a fire underneath, plus optional barrels and brewing stands if you want the higher quality variants. Aging and distilling take real time, which some players love and others find tedious. Almost everything in that loop can be retuned through the config file.

Before diving in, keep the official Brewery wiki bookmarked. It is the authoritative reference for recipes, commands, and permission nodes.

Permissions and Commands

By default, no one can brew anything. You either need operator status or a permissions manager like LuckPerms to hand out the relevant nodes to players or groups. The permission tree covers creating barrels, brewing, drinking, and the administrative commands. Granting a sensible default group access to the basic brewing nodes is usually enough to let a community start experimenting.

If you want a full list, the plugin's permission wiki documents every node along with what it unlocks.

Gathering Ingredients

Most of the raw materials are easy enough: wheat, sugar cane, cocoa beans, apples, and similar farming output. Some recipes ask for biome-specific items, which means a bit of travel. Distilling also calls for blaze powder, which forces at least one trip to the Nether. Stock up before committing to a long brewing session so you are not interrupted halfway through.

Brewing the First Batch

Drinks start in a cauldron filled with water and placed over a fire. The fire matters. Without it, nothing boils, and nothing brews. Right-click the cauldron with an ingredient (wheat for beer, for example) and small particle effects confirm the recipe is active.

From there, right-click the cauldron with a clock to check the boiling timer. Once the recipe has cooked long enough, right-click the cauldron with empty glass bottles to fill them with your fresh, very basic alcohol.

These starter bottles are drinkable, but they are also weak. Most recipes only reach their full strength after distilling, aging, or both. Skipping the refinement stages produces lower quality drinks, which apply heavier negative effects when consumed.

Distilling

If the recipe calls for distilling, set up a brewing stand near the cauldron. Fuel it with blaze powder, put glowstone in the main ingredient slot, and place your drink bottles in the input slots. The brewing animation will take several minutes per pass.

Some recipes benefit from multiple distillation cycles, but overdoing it ruins the drink. Finding the right number of passes for each recipe is part of the fun. If you do not feel like optimizing, a single distillation usually produces something serviceable.

Aging in Barrels

Aging uses a custom-built barrel. Place wooden stairs upside down on the bottom, then a second row of stairs right-side up on top, forming a sealed barrel shape. Attach a sign to the side and write the word Barrel on it. If the structure is valid, the server sends a confirmation message to chat.

Right-click the sign to open the barrel's inventory and drop your drinks inside. Aging is by far the longest part of the process, and depending on the recipe it can transform the contents into completely different beverages or push them to top tier quality.

Drunk Mechanics

Drinks apply effects when consumed. Some are universal, like the brief blurred vision that hits after the first sip, while others are recipe-specific. Nausea and poison show up on lower quality drinks, and quantity scales the duration of every effect.

Your current drunkenness is tracked by a small bar and star icons near the hotbar. Hit the limit and the server stops you from drinking any more, which is the plugin's way of keeping you alive.

The most entertaining side effect is chat distortion. The drunker you are, the more your typed messages get scrambled before they reach other players. A clean Can you read this?! turns into something nobody can parse, which is usually how the rest of the server finds out you have been at it.

If you disconnect while heavily drunk, the plugin can refuse the next login attempt for a short window, returning a custom disconnect message about your character being lost. Some communities love this, others find it annoying on busy servers. Both behaviors can be turned off or rewritten in the config.

The disconnect text is fully customizable, so plenty of servers replace it with running jokes specific to their community.

Drink Catalogue

The default recipe list is long. Beer, wine, rum, vodka, mead, whiskey, and many others are included out of the box, alongside a few non-alcoholic options like coffee and potato soup. The non-alcoholic recipes are useful because they grant beneficial status effects without the chat scrambling, vision warping side of things. Every recipe can be tweaked or disabled in the config file.

Custom Drinks

The plugin ships with a sample custom drink that doubles as a template. Custom drinks support unique names, recipes, effects, commands triggered on consumption, and bespoke chat messages. Communities with even a little creative energy can build a signature menu of beverages tied to lore, events, or in-jokes. Editing the main file is required, so the configuration section below covers the exact steps.

Wakeup Points

When players hit the drinking cap and then log off or pass out, the plugin can teleport them to a designated wakeup point on the next login. Players with the relevant permission can place these points around the world, usually somewhere safe like a tavern or shared spawn. Without wakeup points configured, a complementary plugin such as EssentialsX will send the player back to their /home instead.

Drunk effects carry over after rejoining, though reduced in proportion to the time spent offline.

Editing the Configuration File

Most balancing decisions live in `config.yml` inside the Brewery folder. The HolyHosting panel includes a built-in file editor, so no external software is needed. The file controls everything: recipes, custom drinks, the puking mechanic, disconnect behavior, drunkenness caps, and chat scrambling thresholds. Around line 420 you will find the example custom drink, which is the easiest entry point for adding your own.

When building new recipes, copy the example block in full, paste it below, and only change values you understand. YAML is unforgiving about indentation, so keep the structure identical.

• Open the File Manager and log in.
• Navigate to `/plugins/Brewery`.

• Find `config.yml` and click Edit on the right side.

• Make your changes in the editor and press Save at the top.

• Return to the main panel and restart the server to load the new configuration.

Troubleshooting

The most common issue is players being unable to brew at all. Nine times out of ten this is permissions: either the account lacks the relevant Brewery nodes or no permissions manager is installed. Operator status bypasses all of this, but a proper LuckPerms setup is the long-term answer. Double-check that the cauldron has a fire underneath it as well, since the plugin silently does nothing without one.

If commands return nothing or the plugin appears to be missing entirely, verify the server jar. Brewery only loads on Spigot, Paper, Purpur, or another compatible fork. The base vanilla jar will not run plugins. While you are checking, confirm the Brewery JAR is actually inside the `plugins` directory rather than uploaded one level too high, and that the upload finished at 100% before the restart.

Config file errors are the third recurring problem. A single misplaced colon, missing dash, or removed indent can break the entire file and prevent the plugin from loading. If you suspect a syntax issue, paste the file into a YAML validator before restarting. When the example custom drink is your starting point, leave the original block intact and add new entries beneath it rather than overwriting the template.

Useful Links

• Brewery on Spigot.
• Official Brewery wiki.
• How to add plugins to a Minecraft server.
• Installing and using the LuckPerms plugin.