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[Pickerel]

I have come up against a problem.  I have LOTS of lye, 30 units of it, and want to Make Potash From Lye.
I've been trying to figure out why it wasn't doing so for a while, and I just figured it out: the lye gets taken from bucket form, and put in a bucket immediately.  The problem: once it is in a barrel, I get the message that the dwarf cancels Make Potash from Lye: Needs Lye-Bearing Item.  I have 30 lye in a barrel sitting in the foot stocks, with 10 empty buckets in the same square (because the dwarves emptied the lye into the barrel).
My question: How do I get them to use the now barreled lye at the ashery to make some potash?

[Kogut]

http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Lye "and lye that is in a stockpile cannot be used. "

Maybe you can remove stockpiles? (It is a random guess) Maybe it is forbidden?

[Pickerel]

At your suggestion, I had the dwarves move the lye to a lye-only stockpile, make all other food stockpiles non-lye, and then removed the lye stockpile (leaving non-stockpiled lye).  There's one 'Lye Pot (earthenware, large)', in the pile, with 30 lye in it, sitting on the floor without a sockpile, and still tons of empty buckets, but my dwarves still won't touch it, and I still get the 'Needs Lye-bearing item' message...

Further diagnosis: Now that they aren't always dumping it in a main storage barrel, the dwarves are leaving buckets with lye in existence.  They still give the same 'need lye-bearing item' message, though, and won't use the bucketed lye.  It's not the water+lye bug, where lye gets made in a water-containing bucket, because I completely lack water in this fortress at this time (still waiting to break into lower caverns for that, and hoping there is some).

[Pickerel]

Does anyone know how to get dwarves to use lye to make potash at all?

[Akura]

Potash is made at an Ashery, as with lye. You don't actually need to make lye first, if you have ash bars(ingredient for lye), they can made into potash directly.
As far as I know, potash is made from soaking wood ashes in a pot of water(potash = "pot ash" ) until the water evaporates. Before evaporating, it's lye(I could be very wrong about that). Note, you don't need water to make either lye or potash.

[Pickerel]

Um... perhaps I should be more specific, since I know all that already, as indicated in my first post where I described what I already tried/did...
Does anyone know how to get dwarves to use lye, which is in either a bucket OR a barrel, and not in a stockpile at all, to make potash.