Type Beer Country of origin Denmark Related products | Manufacturer Independent Introduced 2004 | |
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Free Beer, originally known as Vores øl - An open source beer (Danish for: Our Beer), is the first brand of beer with an "open"/"free" brand and recipe. The recipe and trademark elements are published under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.
Contents
The beer was created in 2004 by students at the IT University in Copenhagen together with artist collective Superflex, to illustrate how concepts of the FOSS movement might be applied outside the digital world. The "Free Beer" concept illustrates also the connection between the long tradition of freely sharing cooking recipes with the FOSS movement, which tries to establish this sharing tradition also for the "recipes" of software, the source code. The "Free beer" concept received an overall positive reception from international press and media for the political message, was presented on many exhibitions and conferences, and inspired many breweries in adopting the concept.
Vores Øl
In December 2004 a group of IT University of Copenhagen students together with Superflex brewed a 100-liter batch of a dark heavy beer in their school's cafeteria. The group labeled the beer Vores øl (Danish for: Our Beer), after a 1994 Carlsberg beer advertisement slogan. A website was created to promote the project and the beer's recipe and label designs were published under an open source Creative Commons license, specifically the CC-BY-SA 2.5 license. While unlike software cooking recipes aren't copyrightable the share-alike/copyleft licensing approach is legally questionable and untested in court. After the publication the project received an overall positive reception from international press and media for the political message.
Concept extension "Free Beer"
The developers of the beer stated that the beer was primarily a medium for the message of "dogmatic notions of copyright and intellectual property that are dominating our culture", and admitted that the group had only limited experience in beer production and was not made up of beer gurus. The addition of the non-traditional beer ingredient Guaraná was also partly inspired politically by a previously in 2003 initiated Superflex project, "Guaraná Power", which focussed on the support of Brazilian guaraná farmers with Fair trade.
After the first "Vores Øl" brewing of the open-source beer concept, Superflex continued to develop the concept under the name "Free Beer". A new colorful, unusual "Free Beer" artwork should create associations with the "60's [artistic] liberation" and underline the freedom aspect of the concept. The later name "Free Beer" is a play on Richard Stallman's common remark that free software is "free as in speech, not free as in beer", who suggested also the creation of "Free software beer" instead of an "open source beer".
Recipe development
While the first "Vores øl" recipe draw some technical criticism, the recipe was continuously updated and identified shortcomings got fixed. Originally, the homebrewing community complaint the quality of the process and ingredient description. Remarks were that it was not stated how much water to use in the mash, what type of yeast was to be used, the style of beer being produced (other than being dark and heavy), whether or not any hops were being added for aroma, fermentation temperature, or how the beer was supposed to taste. Making reference to the technical problems of when software instructions ("source code") cannot be made into a functioning program, it was mentioned that if this recipe were source code, it would not compile. Because of the underlying theme of the group's message, the correction and development of this recipe is actively encouraged (in software terminology "bug fixing and patches").
Due to the availability of the recipe and the many Free Beer brewings of breweries and individuals worldwide over the course of years, the recipe was updated several times. Later major Free Beer recipe iterations (v3.0 and 4.0) were also developed in collaboration with a local Danish and experienced brewery, Skands in Brøndby. As previous recipe shortcomings were corrected, for instance the amount of sugar was decreased by 90%, the quality of the beer improved significantly. The recipe's version, which has now reached 4.1, illustrates the community's continuous collaborative improvement progress, made possible by the "open source" nature of Free Beer.
Derived beers
Under its free license, this free beer encourages others to tweak the recipe and redistribute it. Commercial or amateur brewers are able to reuse the recipe. Known derivatives include:
Others took the political idea of an "open/free beer" (not the "Free Beer" recipe and label), opened their own beer recipes and/or artwork, often under free licenses:
Reception and impact
Since its first presentation, the "Free Beer" concept was often reported by international printed and online media, and also discussed in specialist books regarding copyright.
The "Free Beer" project was also well received by the FOSS and open content movement, for instance by Richard Stallman, Cory Doctorow, and Lawrence Lessig. It was presented and sold on several technology conferences and meetings, for instance the "Isummit 2008" and the RMLL 2011, 2012, and 2014. The FSCONS 2008 resulted also in a CC-BY-SA licensed Ebook with the "Free Beer" artwork and title. Free Beer was shown also in the context of several art exhibitions and museums, for instance the Art Basel Miami Beach 2006, the Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands 2007 or the Taipei Biennial 2010 (sponsored by TTL). "Free Beer" was also used in the context of anti-copyright activities and movements, illustrating the advantage of open knowledge for the society.