The Minecraft Brewing Map: Every Chain Runs Through Awkward

Verified: Java 26.3 / Bedrock 26.50 · 2026-09-16 · Updated 2026-09-16

Brewing looks like a wall of recipes, but it is really one road with exits. Nearly everything starts as water bottle plus nether wart — the awkward potion — takes exactly one ingredient to become an effect, and then accepts a short list of after-market modifications. Learn the road once and the brewing planner's chains become predictable instead of memorized.

The trunk road

The awkward potion does nothing when drunk, which is the point: it is the neutral base that accepts effect ingredients. Sixteen potions in the planner's table brew directly — eleven long-standing ones (sugar for Swiftness, rabbit's foot for Leaping, blaze powder for Strength, glistering melon slice for Healing, spider eye for Poison, ghast tear for Regeneration, magma cream for Fire Resistance, pufferfish for Water Breathing, golden carrot for Night Vision, turtle shell for the Turtle Master, phantom membrane for Slow Falling) and the four added with the trial chambers: breeze rod for Wind Charging, slime block for Oozing, cobweb for Weaving, and plain stone for Infestation. The one recipe that skips the trunk entirely is Weakness — fermented spider eye straight onto a water bottle, no wart involved.

The corruption exits

Three potions have no ingredient at all. Slowness, Harming, and Invisibility exist only as corruptions: a fermented spider eye added to a finished potion flips it to its dark twin. Swiftness and Leaping both corrupt to Slowness, Healing and Poison both corrupt to Harming, and Night Vision corrupts to Invisibility. That is the complete verified list — five pairs — and the planner's data table carries exactly those five, asserted by our test suite. A few other corruption claims circulate (Strength to Weakness being the usual one); the sources disagree about them by edition, so this site leaves them out rather than printing a chain that fails at the stand.

Corruption ordering matters for cost, not outcome: Harming via Poison and Harming via Healing produce the same potion, so the planner lets you pick whichever source ingredient you actually have — spider eyes are usually cheaper than glistering melons.

The after-market

Four modifiers, four rules. Redstone dust extends a potion's duration; glowstone dust raises its level and the two are mutually exclusive on the same bottle — the planner applies whichever you pick, preferring glowstone when both are checked. Gunpowder converts any potion to a splash version, and dragon's breath converts a splash potion to a lingering one, strictly in that order. The four trial-chamber potions take neither redstone nor glowstone at all, which the planner enforces rather than politely pretending. And every single brew consumes blaze powder as the stand's fuel — the quiet tax on the whole system, worth remembering before a big session. A stand also brews three bottles at once for the same ingredient, so chains cost the same whether you make one potion or three.

A worked chain

The longest common request is a lingering Harming II. Read it off the map: nether wart into a water bottle (awkward), glistering melon slice (Healing), fermented spider eye (Harming), glowstone (Harming II), gunpowder (splash), dragon's breath (lingering) — six brews, plus six blaze powder along the way. The planner prints this exact sequence, and our tests assert both the step order and the rule that redstone could not have been added alongside the glowstone.

Sources

Recipes, modifiers, and the splash and lingering conversions were verified 2026-09-01 against the Minecraft Wiki's brewing documentation, with the effect-ingredient table and the four trial-chamber recipes read from the same documentation — including the fact that the trial potions refuse both duration and level modifiers. The corruption list is restricted to the pairs every consulted source agrees on; disputed pairs are named above as excluded, not silently dropped.