Brewing Stand

A Brewing Stand is a block used for brewing potions and splash potions.

Crafting
If mined with any tool except a pickaxe, the Brewing Stand will be destroyed.

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. These are the items that can be used on water bottles to create potions: Nether Wart (Awkward potion, the base for other potions), Redstone, Ghast Tears, Glowstone Dust, Gunpowder, Glistering Melon, Magma Cream, Blaze Powder, Sugar, Spider Eyes, Fermented Spider Eyes, Pufferfish, and Golden Carrots. While distilling an ingredient into the bottles, 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:

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 emits a low amount of light (light level 1)
 * When a brewing stand is broken, particles from the bottle will appear, even if no bottle is in the stand.
 * No matter what potion is in the stand it always looks red.
 * Brewing stands will always face east, no matter what direction it was placed.
 * Even if there is an empty bottle in the brewing stand, it will still look like there is water in it.