How to make ale and use the tavern in Manor Lords

Manor Lords tavern - Peasants walking through town

(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

Working out how the tavern functions in Manor Lords is an important step in caring for your families. Tavern supply is one of the listed amenities alongside church access and water supply, so it's a necessary provision if you want to upgrade your burgage plots to level three. This will let you collect more regional wealth from them per month, but more importantly, is a condition for becoming a large town.

That said, this isn't your bog standard city builder where you can just build a thing and it'll function perfectly. In order for your tavern to provide access to your subjects, you'll also need to procure the ale that gets served there. Here I'll explain how the tavern functions, plus the different ways you can get ale and provide access.

How to use the tavern and make ale

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Manor Lords tavern - Barley — Build a farmhouse and plant some fields to grow barley(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

Unlike the church, where you can provide access simply by building it, for the tavern to work properly you'll need to supply it with one all-important resource: ale. After all, it's not much of a tavern if there's nothing to drink. There are two main ways you can get ale.

The first is to make it yourself:

Create some fields in a spot with decent barley fertility—you can select this overlay to the right of the screen after you click the build menu. You'll also need a farmhouse to oversee the ploughing, sowing, and harvesting when the time rolls around.
Harvest time is around September, but before then you'll need two other buildings. The first is the malthouse, which will convert your harvested barley into malt. Place this near to the farmhouse for convenience.
The second building you need is a brewery extension in a level two burgage plot with a workshop—to get one of these, drag out the blueprint when building until you see a little hammer in a house symbol. The brewery costs five regional wealth and five planks, and converts the entire family into artisan brewers who turn any available malt into tasty ale.
Lastly, put a family in your tavern to run it and distribute your fine hooch to nearby burgage plots.

That's for sure the most complicated method. If you have surplus regional wealth through trade, you can use the cheap and nasty solution:

Establish a trade route for ale in the trading post
Import however much ale you want for your tavern

It's worth noting that you can import barley and malt, too, and these are cheaper than directly buying ale, so you might choose just to skip a couple of steps in the process. Since you only need tavern supply at the point of upgrading your burgage plots to level three, I'd suggest having the resources ready to upgrade all of them before you import your ale, then you don't need to worry about constantly supplying your tavern while you accumulate the rest.

Sean's first PC games were Full Throttle and Total Annihilation and his taste has stayed much the same since. When not scouring games for secrets or bashing his head against puzzles, you'll find him revisiting old Total War campaigns, agonizing over his Destiny 2 fit, or still trying to finish the Horus Heresy. Sean has also written for EDGE, Eurogamer, PCGamesN, Wireframe, EGMNOW, and Inverse.