Thing is, if I had to make a vanilla timer, I could just tie it to a hopper beneath it. The vanilla timer is the big part of an automatic brewery, the brewery module itself is only 4x3x1 big. I did however realize I had translocators, and once I had read up on them where able to construct a quite compact thingy, a 3x3x3 fully automated brewery that brews with three stands simultaneously, creating ~27 triple ingredient potions per minute (I don't use that much splash potions, so I can have a splash converter in a separate module). Only drawback is you have to manually program in each potion you want to make, but it could hold up to 9 processes at a time so I don't need to "unprogram" to change type. 9 should cover most potion needs; speed, regen, splash healing, fire res, night vision and strength are like 95% of what I use, and those are only 6.
It's also a goddamn pretty machine.
The simplest way to make a vanilla automated brewery is to use a hopper to supply all ingredients to a single brewing stand, letting each operation take 60 or 80 seconds (depending on splash or not) and using a hopper-timer to make that clock. It's not really hard to do, but a hopper timer for 80 seconds takes up at least something like 6x2x4, so it's hard to slot into a slim castle tower.
If it was a long time since you played vanilla, I strongly recommend you test it a weekend or so. It's really cool how much you can do in vanilla now that previously was mod only, but it takes some ingenuity which at least to me makes it fun. I also learned things that are quite easy in vanilla that is so effective I'll still use it when playing modded, such as iron farms. Those had flown right over my head when playing modded, since there's so many recipes etc to learn. Since I started playing vanilla again, I find large modpacks a bit to simple, and prefer to keep it small so I'm forced to think a bit about how to do stuff.
Yes, that's the exact basis of the design. A very good design for a semiatomatic brewer, that is plenty useful even in modded minecraft, is something like this:
DH
DC
DHC
_BH
D=Dropper, H=Hopper, C=Chest = Brewery. You put a button on the dropper in the middle, fill them up bottom to top with nether wart, ingredient, modifier, and woila! press the button and you have three potions. Only 4x3x1, or 4x2x2 if you prefer that shape.
New question though: Does anyone know if you can program a translocator to draw "everything except"? My ender chest for mining has an output by translocator, and I'd like to split them between "stone/cobble" and "everything else". Right now it works so-and-so; the stone receiver has glowstone but seems only to draw 16 per tick, so about 93% goes the right way, but those 7% are annoying.
