Brewing Stand

The Brewing Stand is a block used for Brewing Potions and Splash Potions, replacing the Cauldron after Beta 1.9 pre-release 2.

Usage
A brewing Stand is required to make potions. When right-clicked, the brewing stand interface shows. The Brewing Stand interface has 4 slots. The bottom 3 slots are for glass bottles. These bottles must be filled with water or a potion. The upper slot is used to brew an ingredient into the potions below. The items which can be used as ingredients on water bottles are: Nether Wart (Awkward potion, the base for other potions), Redstone Dust, Ghast Tears, Glowstone Dust, Gunpowder, Glistering Melon, Magma Cream, Blaze Powder, Sugar, Spider Eyes, or Fermented Spider Eyes. Brewing Stands will only drop as an item if mined with a pickaxe. While Distilling a reagent into the glass bottles filled with water or potion, one ingredient will distill into all three slots. E.g. One Nether Wart will create three Awkward Potions.

History
It was revealed on September 30, 2011, when Jeb posted these 2 tweets:

The vessel used for brewing was originally going to be the Cauldron, but it was replaced by the Brewing Stand in the Beta 1.9 Pre-release. When the first brewing stand appeared, it had an additional 2D sub-stand for bottles,(see the first picture in the gallery) but now the stands for bottles have been designed in 3D.

Trivia

 * The first version of the brewing stand was textured in 2D, and therefore the bottles of potion liquid were paper-thin and looked too small to hold anything.
 * The 8 bubbles on the left of the GUI are simply decoration, the arrow on the right shows how long it will take to brew the potions.
 * Even when the brewing stand is not in use, there is still smoke coming out of the top of it.
 * The brewing stand seems to raise the surrounding light level slightly. This suggests they do have some luminance of their own, although this has not yet been confirmed.

Bugs

 * When you punch a brewing stand, it becomes darker. This bug also occurs with beds and used to occur with fancy side-grass in Beta 1.5.