How am I supposed to brew beer?

[Tibi]

Yes I know I should just grow barley, but no part of my land has above 20% fertility. And the only part of the entire map that's fertile enough to grow it is controlled by the enemy lord, so I can't even expand to it without an army, and he has way more troops than I could even dream about recruiting.
This is starting to be an issue, because working taverns are the only thing missing to upgrade my settlement to a higher level. Am I supposed to import barley at a horribly inflated price, or is it ok to just get stuck with level 2 houses, and not being able to upgrade my settlement? Or is it worth trying to farm barley at 10-20% fertility rate?

[Be kind to each other.]

As of right now, the trading upgrade tree is the only OP strategy for the game with the tariffs reduction for importing. It's practically a "must have" if you want a successful village unless you claim a richly fertile territory and start exporting your goods to your base settlement through the mule post. You could try diverting resources to creating a barley farm or just import malt and set a couple burgages to be breweries to supply the tavern. Barley is just the first step to brewing and you could cut it out if you import malt.

[Prikkiki-Ti]

Why not import the Ale directly? Instead of the farms you can assign those people to work elsewhere and produce other items which you can sell to get the money for the Ale.

[Tibi]

Originally posted by Prikkiki-Ti:

Why not import the Ale directly? Instead of the farms you can assign those people to work elsewhere and produce other items which you can sell to get the money for the Ale.

Importing ale has a large upfront cost to set up the trade route, and I barely have any wealth. Maybe I should just start a new game.

[Richygrindcore]

I'm in this position as well. I'm trying to trade what I can for wealth to open an ale route.