Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator Review

Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator, developed by Auroch Digital and published by Fireshine Games, is a fancy representation of running a homebrew business. The game is a relaxing experience that will secretly penalise you for mucking up steps via the overall score you get – or will reject your batch with a description of why it’s dog water – when ‘tasting and packaging’ your beer.

Starting the game, the tutorial is straightforward as it guides you through a basic but thorough process that dates back to our early ancestors. Don’t worry, you won’t need prior knowledge to play Brewmaster. Each season, you can acquire jobs, recipes and read well-written articles about the history and culture of alcohol brewing in an in-game magazine called Brewer’s Quarterly. Local breweries will also advertise in the magazine for tailor made brews with specific qualities, giving you the chance to sell off batches from previous jobs that didn’t make the cut.

Completing jobs and story objectives will reward you with unique utensils as well as tokens used to purchase ingredients and equipment. Later in the game, you have the chance to participate in competitions that also grant tokens and unlockable decorations to place around the kitchen and living room.

In the kitchen – where you’ll spend most of the game listening to royalty-free music (that I rather liked) – everything you use has its own location, split up into three distinctive spots: the fridge (where yeast, malt and hops are stored), equipment, and ingredients cupboards. This helps the player familiarise themselves to know where everything is, including where recently purchased items will mostly be when retrieved from the delivery box in the entryway.

When you’ve finished the tutorial, you can make as much beer as you want with any items available. It also helps that once an item is bought, you have an unlimited stock which leads to experimentation of different flavours and combinations. That’s where the fun of Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator lies.

Brewmaster has two types of techniques to make beer; extract and all-grain. Extract is the easiest process, using malts and ingredients placed in absorbable sock-like bags, similar to teabags, to extract the nutrients and proteins into a blend before fermenting. All-grain on the other hand does the same thing but with additional steps in the beginning.

To do an all-grain brew, you need a tub called a Mash Tun. Essentially, you place grains into the tub, heat up a large pot of water at an approximate temperature before pouring half of the pot into the Mash Tun which leads to the hardest part of the game. To keep the grain water from turning bad, you have to keep it hot enough (while heating another pot to boil) for 50 minutes.

It’s easier said than done as you can’t put a plastic tub on a burner. When done, you can flush the batch into the cooking pot and it continues as normal. With the amount of times I spoiled the pot or burnt the grain, I could have just sold it as an inedible porridge and made up for lost time.

When brewing each batch, you don’t always make the right measurements or you accidentally make a mistake which leads to the uniquity of each attempt you make to perfect an ale or stout. This motivates you to keep going until you just throw the recipes up in the air and combine chocolate and coffee powder with wheat malt and New Zealand hops and call it Mature Māori Mocha. When you’ve finished everything and ‘tasted’ the beer, the design of the logo on the bottle can be customised for display.

Just a heads-up to anyone interested in playing Brewmaster, there are no limitations or constraints to what you can name your bottles.

Brewmaster can be played in real-time – letting you do other things while waiting to do the next step; like write a review of the game – or cut time short with a fast-forward time mechanic which is great but I would sometimes overshoot the timer or over-boil and ruin the batch. It’s common to make drastic mistakes at the start; not only because you’re learning how to brew but because the game demands a level of patience to succeed.

Visually, Brewmaster looks better than most simulators on the market. The textures and architecture of your surroundings reminds me of House Flipper, as to say it looks like Auroch Digital took inspiration from programs on various home and lifestyle channels to create a 40-something’s dream retirement house. A small discrepancy that doesn’t mean anything to the overall game is the power outlets are made of wood, which begs the question; how much did the electrician hate the homeowner?

Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator’s sound effects can easily be categorised into two groups, diegetic sounds like boiling water overtaking the hiss of the gas cooker and the sloshing of liquid in tubs when picked up, and non-diegetic pings when you’ve packaged your beers or completed a job; simple game ‘dings’ to acknowledge you’ve done something good. The sound design is at its most relevant, with no sound displaced or out-of-sync with your actions.

The only criticism of the game is the game can stutter or freeze for a second when you open up menus or do an action too quickly which only happened to me occasionally. With the year winding down, and all of us have more time on our hands, do not pass up an opportunity to add Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator to your collection.