Cask and Profiting: The Best Crops for Quality Wine

Did you know? You can earn a hefty amount of gold in Stardew Valley by selling the finest wines? If you don’t know that yet, follow this guide as you’ll know everything about a cask. We’ll also help you with the best fruits for better profiting.

Making, aging, and selling wines is well-known for being the most lucrative way of earning gold in Stardew Valley. With the right fruit and keg, you can have thousands of money in your pocket for a single bottle. However, it’s possible to earn more with patience by aging your goods in the cellar.

Although it’s not difficult to tend to crops with automation, it’s still time-consuming. Moreover, most fruits and vegetables aren’t worth that much. That’s why many beginners end up getting tiny profits and reinvesting them into seeds. How about we turn your crop and increase its selling price?

With different choices of fruits in Stardew Valley, it’ll take a while to test each and see which is profiting well. But don’t worry, here’s where this guide comes in. We’ll give you tips on setting up every cask and the basics you’ll need. Most importantly, you’ll know which crops offer the most profit for aging wines.

What is a Cask?

A cask is a piece of late-game equipment for aging artisan goods such as beer, cheese, wine, and more. It works like a keg, except it increases a wine’s quality. As a result, its price will increase and consuming it will give extra energy and health than regular ones.

After getting the last farmhouse upgrade, you’ll get 33 casks and their crafting recipe (20 pieces of wood and one hardwood). 

Among all artisan goods, aging iridium quality wines take 56 days or two seasons! It’s a lot of waiting time, but you’ll get double the value by doing so. Instead of idling around, do chores or try these crazy adventures and challenges. However, make sure you’re doing the business as cost and time-efficient as possible with high-profit plants.

Best Plants For Making Wines

Regardless of the fruit, it’ll take 6.25 days to make wines in kegs. It’s hard to track the selling price of a raw crop, so make sure to sell quality ones and leave its regular counterpart. However, running short in resources is common, so loading iridium quality fruits in a keg and a cask can still make a difference.

The first step for aging a wine starts by crafting kegs and using these best crops:

Starfruit

This yellow star-shaped crop is a combination of sweet and sour flavors. You can get endless seeds from Sandy at the Oasis, and you can grow it in summer for 13 days. If you want to save time and get more yields, consider using Deluxe Speed-Gro with the Agriculturist profession.

Ancient Fruit

Although you can’t eat this once-dormant fruit, it’s highly-valuable in wine-making. Getting the seeds might be tricky. However, replicating them with a Seedmaker can help. It takes 28 days for the plant to grow but thrives in any season except winter, and you’ll get the produce weekly.

Pineapple

As the latest addition in Stardew Valley, Pineapple seeds grow best on Ginger Island for 14 days. You don’t have to worry about spending 1000g for a boat and water it every day as long as you have sprinklers. It regrows Pineapple weekly, so make sure to visit your mini-farm.

Melon

Aside from their impressive healing effect, melons sell fairly high when converted into wine. The crop is your last resort if you’re out of the top three crops on the list. 

Growing melons take 12 days in Summer, but you can grow them outside the farm, like every seed. For the best results, using Hyper Speed-Gro and Agriculturist will give you four rounds of harvesting – that’s if you start planting by Day 1.

Beginner-friendly note: Growing crops outside the farm is possible. Work your way to get the Greenhouse and unlock the Ginger Island. They’re indispensable during winter when crops won’t thrive.

With that said, here’s a simple table with all four fruits and their price:

Aging Wines From Cask and Profiting

Assuming you have set up the proper layout and filled your cellar with casks, it’s time to load up your crops. 

Fourteen days after the first process, you’ll get the silver quality. Add another two weeks, and your wine’s quality will turn gold. However, the best results happen at its iridium state, where value is doubled, but you’ll need to wait two seasons.

The Artisan profession can even increase every artisan good’s profit by 40% once you reach Level 10 in Farming. Here’s a close comparison of the top four fruits for cask with their selling price on every quality. We’ll consider wines with and without the profession.

Is Automation with a Cask Possible?

While using hoppers to a cask is possible, it’s still inefficient. A basic setup needs space for both casks and hoppers, but you’ll lose a significant amount. If you want to push through with the ambitious layout with minimal loss, you might consider expanding your cellar or installing this automation mod.

Conclusion

Growing crops is hard and tedious at most times. You till the soil, sprinkle seeds and fertilizers, water them, and do the same thing every morning. In the end, you’ll get fewer returns for the effort and time, and you’ll find yourself growing more plants.

A cask can prevent all shortcomings for an unsatisfactory income if you know the right profession and fruits. 

It might cost a little fortune, but hey, it’s one of the best passive earnings in Stardew Valley.