How to Brew Potions in Minecraft - Beginner's Guide

If you want to know how to brew potions in Minecraft, the short version is this: build a brewing stand, fuel it with blaze powder, fill glass bottles with water, add nether wart to make an Awkward Potion, then add an effect ingredient. That's the entire loop. Everything else is just learning which ingredient gives which effect, and how to use redstone or glowstone to tweak the result.

This guide walks through the whole thing in order, with the recipes that actually exist in the current Java and Bedrock versions.

What you need before you brew

Brewing has a small list of prerequisites, and most of them require a trip to the Nether. Before you start, gather:

• A brewing stand — crafted from 3 cobblestone (or blackstone) and 1 blaze rod. The blaze rod goes in the top-center slot of a crafting table, with the three stone blocks across the middle row. (Brewing Stand – Minecraft Wiki)
• Blaze powder — your fuel. Craft 1 blaze rod into 2 blaze powder. One blaze powder fuels 20 brewing operations. (Blaze Powder – Minecraft Wiki)
• Glass bottles — three at a time fit in a brewing stand. Craft 3 glass into 3 bottles.
• Water — right-click a water source or a filled cauldron with empty bottles to fill them.
• Nether wart — found growing in soul sand inside Nether fortresses, or in bastion remnants. This is the base ingredient for almost every useful potion.

How the brewing stand works

Place the brewing stand and right-click to open it. The interface has four slots:

1. Top slot (ingredient) — the item you're adding to the potions below.
2. Three bottom slots — for water bottles or potions you're modifying.
3. Left side (fuel) — blaze powder. The fuel bar fills up automatically when you drop blaze powder in.

A single brew takes 20 seconds (400 ticks) and applies the ingredient to all three bottles at once, so always brew in batches of three. If you only put in one bottle, you waste two-thirds of an ingredient.

Step 1: Fill bottles with water

Use three empty glass bottles on a water source block to get three water bottles. Drop them in the bottom slots of the brewing stand. Water bottles do nothing on their own — they're the canvas.

Step 2: Brew an Awkward Potion

Put nether wart in the ingredient slot. After 20 seconds, your three water bottles become three Awkward Potions. Awkward Potion has no effect by itself, but it's the base for almost every potion in the game. (Awkward Potion – Minecraft Wiki)

There's exactly one exception worth knowing: dropping a fermented spider eye onto a water bottle directly produces a Potion of Weakness. That's the only useful potion you can brew without nether wart.

Step 3: Add an effect ingredient

Now drop one of the following into the ingredient slot of your three Awkward Potions to get a finished potion. Each row is one ingredient that turns Awkward Potion into the named effect:

Effect	Ingredient	Default duration
Healing (instant)	Glistering melon	Instant
Strength	Blaze powder	3:00
Swiftness (Speed)	Sugar	3:00
Leaping (Jump Boost)	Rabbit's foot	3:00
Fire Resistance	Magma cream	3:00
Night Vision	Golden carrot	3:00
Water Breathing	Pufferfish	3:00
Regeneration	Ghast tear	0:45
Poison	Spider eye	0:45
Slow Falling	Phantom membrane	1:30
Turtle Master	Turtle scute	0:20
Weakness	Fermented spider eye (on water)	1:30

Source: Brewing – Minecraft Wiki.

Step 4: Modify with redstone or glowstone (optional)

Once you have a finished potion, you can extend it or strengthen it by brewing it again with a modifier. You only get to pick one — they cancel each other out.

• Redstone dust extends the duration. Useful on Night Vision, Fire Resistance, Swiftness, Water Breathing — anything where lasting longer matters more than hitting harder. Has no effect on instant potions like Healing or Harming.
• Glowstone dust boosts the effect level (e.g. Strength I → Strength II), but cuts the duration roughly in half. Some potions — Night Vision, Fire Resistance, Water Breathing, Slow Falling, Invisibility — have no tier II, so glowstone does nothing on them.

If you've already added redstone and you add glowstone after, the glowstone overwrites the redstone (and vice versa). Pick one.

Step 5: Make it splash or lingering (optional)

Effect potions can be thrown if you convert them:

1. Add gunpowder to a regular potion → Splash Potion. Throws like a snowball, applies the effect to anything it hits in a small radius.
2. Add Dragon's Breath to a splash potion → Lingering Potion. On impact it leaves a 3-block-radius cloud for about 30 seconds, hitting anything that walks through.

Dragon's Breath only drops one way: bottling the End dragon's breath attacks during the boss fight. Bring a stack of glass bottles to your first dragon fight and harvest the purple clouds. (Dragon's Breath – Minecraft Wiki)

Lingering potions also feed into tipped arrows — craft 8 arrows around a lingering potion in a crafting table to get 8 tipped arrows of the same effect.

Corrupting potions with fermented spider eye

Fermented spider eye does something different from the other ingredients: it flips a positive potion into a negative one. Useful conversions:

• Night Vision → Invisibility
• Swiftness → Slowness
• Leaping → Slowness (yes, two paths to the same potion)
• Healing → Harming
• Poison → Harming

To craft a fermented spider eye, combine 1 spider eye + 1 brown mushroom + 1 sugar in a crafting table.

A practical brewing order to start with

If you only set up one brewing run on your first night with a stand, do this. It covers most early-game needs and uses ingredients you can realistically have:

1. Brew 3 Awkward Potions (3 nether wart on 3 water bottles).
2. Add a golden carrot → 3 Night Vision potions.
3. Brew 3 more Awkward Potions.
4. Add magma cream → 3 Fire Resistance potions.
5. Optionally extend either with redstone for an 8-minute version.

Night Vision and Fire Resistance are the two potions almost every player benefits from — caves and the Nether stop being scary the moment you have them.

Common mistakes to avoid

A few things that trip up new brewers:

• Forgetting fuel. The brewing stand will sit there doing nothing if the fuel bar is empty. Drop blaze powder in the left slot.
• Brewing one bottle at a time. Each ingredient applies to all three slots simultaneously. Always fill all three.
• Using glowstone on a potion with no tier II. Night Vision, Fire Resistance, Water Breathing, Slow Falling, and Invisibility don't get stronger — glowstone wastes the potion's duration without giving you anything.
• Drinking a Lingering Potion. You can't. Lingering potions can only be thrown, and they affect the cloud, not you.

What's next

Once brewing feels routine, the natural next steps are setting up automated nether wart and sugar cane farms, building an enderman XP farm in the End for ghast tear and dragon's breath runs, and using tipped arrows to apply effects from range. But the loop above is the whole skill — fill bottles, awkward potion, effect ingredient, optional modifier. Everything else is just memorizing which ingredient does what.