How to find a particular resource in Dwarf Fortress

Look for a volcano on the embark map - in ASCII mode it's represented by red caret character.

I would suggest using a manager noble and the management screen (j, m) where you can queue up tasks. I find it useful to do thinks like:

• Queue 15 barrel
• Queue 15 brew drinks

And jobs that are managed are automatically re-assigned if they fail for any reason including lack of resources. So in this case the brew drinks would be re-assigned until the barrels are available to complete them.

Note that these tasks will process in parallel.