Is Brewing a Craft or a Profession?
The main reason I want to know is regarding qualities of craftsmanship, up to and including Touched by the Realm. That virtue is worded such that the magic you craft is geared toward a specific recipient, if I understand correctly, which would indicate it doesn't work for brewing, but I thought I'd ask the crowd.
by A&A it produces a product therefore it is a craft. By Covenants it is listed under "savings limits by craft' so yeah- craft.
In general if you produce a good it's a craft and if you offer a service it's a profession.
So brewing would be "craft" but serving pints of beer would a "profession".
It has to be tailored for a specific recipient indeed, but I don't see why it couldn't be magical. Now brewing would be easy to abuse if the brewer claims to make a cubic meter of magical beer in that season.
But if one refines it down the best "pint" of the barrel through mystical means, then I see no reason why that one dose of beer couldn't have a magical effect for that one specific person, alternatively, the entire batch has to be consumed to provide the effect (so it could be 20 pints for a very determined Scotsman).
So for a one-off effect, brewing a magic potion makes sense. To some extent that's what the plot of Brave is about: a potion of shape of the woodland prowler (bear), but as a whole I think it's a good stop gap between just the old woman in the woods who offers (love?) potions and being a full on witch. The ability for a grog to brew a pint of "Lager of the Child-like Faith" (PeMe) or "Ale of Slumber"(ReMe) aimed as a specific mundane or the "Porter of Ennobled Presence" (CrIm) for a Magus would be really convenient. So long as only one "dose" is brewed per season, I'd say it's fine.
if I remember correctly the same ability is used to make Magical poems and ballads for bards in the Contested Isle so magical beer certainly looks practical in that comparison
Personally I would have no trouble with a full tonne (250 gallon vat) being produced in a season, but its going to take someone a long time to drink that if it only benefits one person. Of course the real limit will be the fact that you are creating invested devices instead of long term enchantments at that point so the real limit is in how many functional doses.
The poems still fit the invested device model. I think the consumable nature of beer (and there are other crafted things this could apply to also) doesn't fit; is there a way to make sense of it without resorting to house rules?
The idea of the best (magical) part of the beer being a number of doses would make it easy to convert to charged items/potions, but that's in house rule territory.
sorry- treat as charged items, instead of accumulating points towards finishing the project after the craft score is met, calculate number of doses. since craft magic requires 1 point per magnitude that means one dose per point they are over the craft total.
That's also the route that I'd follow.
Would you have them remain specific to a recipient? (either of you?)
maybe, that is a decision I would probably make on a campaign by campaign basis, since one of the advantages of craft enchanting is that you forgo vis by tying it to an individual, where charged items don't normally require vis, on the other hand it does seem to be an intrinsic part of the art. A lot of that will have to do with how I see magic and the semi-mundane realms interacting. The background cosmology of my worlds can get very complicated and 9 times in ten the players have no idea what it is...
My troupe and I quite some time ago we had a similar situation with a grog ... cook? baker? maybe even brewer? I honestly can't remember. I do remember he -- actually, I think it was a she -- had the Minor Virtue Mythic Professional, the more limited version of Touched by Realm, from Grogs p.76. And the catch was: food is perishable, and if it must be for a single recipient, the Virtue is not so useful.
Then we realized that really, the constraint is that the Wondrous Item is not for a single recipient of the effect, but for a single user that can use the item at R:Touch ... and we thought: what if the product of the craft is not the food itself, but a recipe? So, you can craft a recipe for someone, and that someone uses it to create food that he personally serves, it's not really so different from R:Touch to say that whoever partakes of the food is affected (limited by the uses/day of the recipe). Most of the time the "mystical chef" would make a recipe for his own use, but would occasionally make it for someone else -- in practice, teaching the recipe to the other person.
Some time after that we got to read the description of Wordsmiths in TCI p.117, that basically has exactly the same process as above but
a) for the Touched by Realm Major Virtue instead of the Mythic Professional Minor Virtue
b) for poems rather than food recipes: partaking of the food served personally by the "user" of the recipe becomes listening to the poem recited personally by the "user" of the poem.
c) the R/D/T is somewhat more limited in some ways, somewhat more powerful in others: it can only work at R:Per D:Performance (+1 mag) T:Sound (+3 mag).