There are a variety of recipes you can make with the crops you harvest in Stardew Valley. Some of them require you to purchase specific seeds from the shop at a certain time of year, grow that crop throughout the year, hold on to them, and then make it another time to maximize your profits. You can do this to produce pale ale, a recipe in Stardew Valley that you can craft if you make hops starting in the summer. Here’s how you can make a pale ale and make the most from your investment with it.
Harvesting Hops
The primary ingredient to pale ale is hops. You can start laying those on your farm starting in the summer, and they only cost 60 gold if you purchase them from the general store. The harvest takes 11 days to produce harvest fully, but you can consistently receive hops from them after this. Once summer ends and fall arrives, though, you’ll be unable to acquire more. Hops sell for 25 gold at its best and 37 gold at its highest value, so there’s no real reason to sell this product at all, and it’s far better to reserve it inside of chests for fall when you can start producing pale ale.
Crafting Pale Ale
Once you have plenty of hops from your summer harvest in the fall, you can place them inside of kegs. You can craft a keg at farming level 8, so it’s not something you can immediately start making, but you might be able to craft this sometime during the first winter. These are the ingredients you need to create a keg.
- 30 Wood1 Copper Bar1 Iron Bar1 Oak Resin
All of these items are easily obtainable. Depending on how many hops you harvest from your farm, you’ll be able to produce multiple pale ales from having several kegs. It takes one to two days for the pale ale to finish processing, and once it does, you’ll be able to sell it for 300 gold at its base value, 375 gold for its silver, 450 gold for its gold, and 600 gold for its iridium value. These prices go up by 40% if you have the artisan profession.
While producing pale ale for your farm in Stardew Valley seems a bit hefty, it’s a worthwhile experience. You can potentially do this during your first winter if you spend plenty of time increasing your farming level during spring and set aside a large portion of your farm in the summer to harvest hops. The main difficulty might be attempting to balance this and venturing into the mines to acquire enough materials to make multiple kegs. This is likely a second-year summer venture, though.
