Permanent Brew

"Berserker brew becomes PERMANENT on Monkeys who drink it."

- BTD6

 is the final upgrade of Path 1 for the Alchemist. It enhances the duration of all of its buff potions, the Stronger Stimulant potion and Acidic Mixture Dip potion, to last indefinitely instead of the original usage duration of 40 and 10 shots per applied potion respectively, provided that the Permanent Brew Alchemist is not sold or sacrificed.

The buffs are given separately from each other. The exact buffs given are +1 damage, +3 pierce, +17.6% attack speed (x0.85 attack cooldown), +15% range from the Stronger Stimulant buff, and +1 damage to Ceramic and MOAB-class bloons plus granting lead-popping power from Acidic Mixture Dip.

It costs $51,000 on Easy, $60,000 on Medium, $64,800 on Hard, and $72,000 on Impoppable.

Summary
While most strategies will settle for a lower tier Alchemist or other cheaper buff, Permanent Brew provides an extremely strong buff but at an extreme cost. In CHIMPS, this means that it tends be difficult to afford, but usable if planned out with an extremely greedy strategy. Outside of CHIMPS, it is much more accessible and good to add to your defense if you have a tower that receives buffs well, as its damage buff is unique and comes with pierce and attack speed buffs and can come in useful.

Tips

 * Post Round 81, the appearance of superceramics mean that it effectively acts as a +2 damage buff when both buffs are applied. In addition, it is frequently used as an MIB in strategies which use it.
 * Note that the Acid buff does not grant towers with the ability to pop Frozen Bloons.
 * Pair it with good towers that benefit highly by increased damage, increased attack speed, and increased pierce. Permanent Brew sees most use with Sun Avatar due to its ability to save up to it. On easier maps, The Tack Zone is also one of the better towers that can save up to Permanent Brew. Hero choice is important because using Pat or Obyn will lengthen the amount of time the towers mentioned aboved can solo until Permanent Brew.
 * Grandmaster Ninja, other Super Monkey upgrades (e.g. Robo Monkey, Tech Terror, Dark Knight, Dark Champion), and Captain Churchill are other examples of towers who also benefit a lot from the buff, but it tends to be difficult to afford Permanent Brew with them.
 * Because Permanent Brew targets towers within its immediate range, towers coming in large groups such as Shinobi Tactics or Overdrive will also work well with Permanent Brew. For Shinobis, perma-buffing them will allow more important targets to be buffed too. For Overdrive, while Stronger Stimulant gives good uptime with Overdrive, doesn't have enough uptime to sustain more than a small group of them; Permanent Brew can buff all of the Overdrives within range.
 * Since selling Permanent Brew will destroy the Permanent Brew effect, the Permanent Brew Alchemist can be moved by Support Chinook, allowing the Alchemist to be placed anywhere on the map to provide even more towers the Permanent Brew effect than just the towers currently in range.
 * In the absence of a Support Chinook, it is possible to brew more than the towers within range of the Permanent Brew by using Dark Knights and Dark Champions instead of other towers. This is because the entire Tier 3+ Path 3 Super Monkey path is capable of teleportation around the map, allowing themselves to move out of the buffing area to make space for other towers.
 * Likewise, Permanent Brew is able to buff more towers than within its immediate range on Geared, a map where towers always move around each round, and currently the only viable map for that.
 * The crosspath for Permanent Brew has minimal impact, as the brews never expire on its targets (unless sold or sacrificed). However, the Faster Throwing crosspath (5-0-1) is generally preferred as it allows the tower to apply the permanent buff to a large number of towers more quickly after initially obtaining the upgrade.
 * Additionally, the faster throwing upgrade increases the efficacy of the tier 4 Stronger Stimulant upgrade while saving up for the tier 5 Permanent Brew.

Sounds
Starting from Stronger Stimulant, which includes Permanent Brew, the Alchemist now plays sounds as it buffs other towers.

When brewing a nearby tower:


 * [glass smash]
 * [glass smash]
 * [glass smash]
 * [glass smash]
 * [glass smash]

Trivia

 * Permanent Brew is the only upgrade whose name contains the word "Permanent". Other upgrades, such as Permafrost, Perma Charge, and Perma-Spike, all simply contain "Perma-" but not "Permanent".
 * There was a bug where Stronger Stimulant would visually give more range than Perma-Brew, making the Perma-Brew buff seemingly weaker. This was fixed in update 6.0.
 * Permanent Brew is possibly based on beer, as Alchemist holds a wooden mug(s) used for drinking beer.