Free Beer, originally known as Vores Øl (English: Our Beer), is a Danish brand of beer that markets itself as being the world's first open-source beer. It was created in 2004 by students at the IT University of Copenhagen and the artist collective Superflex to illustrate how concepts of the FOSS movement might be applied outside of the digital world. In contrast to the practice of trade secrets, the Free Beer brand advocates for the free sharing of recipes and analogizing it to the FOSS movement's open sharing of software and source code. Free Beer operates by sharing its recipe and trademark elements, under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license, with breweries and individuals.
History
Vores Øl
In December 2004, a group of students from the IT University of Copenhagen, along with Superflex, brewed a 100-liter batch of dark, heavy beer in the university cafeteria. The group named the beer Vores Øl (Danish for 'Our Beer'), inspired by 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. Since cooking recipes are not copyrightable, the share-alike/licensing approach used here was legally questionable and has not been tested in a court of law.
Concept extension Free Beer
The developers of the beer stated that it was primarily a medium for bringing awareness about the "dogmatic notions of copyright and intellectual property that are dominating our culture", and admitted that the group had 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 2003 initiated Superflex project, "Guaraná Power", which focused on the support of Brazilian guaraná farmers with Fairtrade.
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 Free Beer label design created associations with the "60's [artistic] liberation" and underlined the freedom aspect of the concept. The newer 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 also suggested the creation of "Free software beer" instead of an "open source beer".
Recipe development
While the first Vores Øl recipe drew some technical criticism, the recipe was updated and adjusted. Originally, the homebrewing community complained about the quality of the process and ingredient description. Feedback stated that it had not outlined how much water to use in the mash, what type of yeast to use, the style of beer being produced (other than being dark and heavy), whether or not to add any hops for aroma, what the fermentation temperature should be, or how the beer was supposed to taste. Referring to the technical problems of when software instructions ("source code") cannot be made into a functioning program, it was said 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 are actively encouraged (in software terminology "bug fixing and patches").
Due to the availability of the recipe, and Free Beer brewing happening worldwide, the recipe was updated several times. Major Free Beer recipe iterations (v3.0 and 4.0) were developed in collaboration with a local Danish brewery, Skands in Brøndby. As previous recipe shortcomings were corrected, for example, the amount of sugar was decreased by 90%, and the quality of the beer improved significantly. The recipe's version, which has now reached 6.0 in 2017, illustrates the community's continuous collaborative improvement progress, made possible by the "open source" nature of Free Beer.
In 2022, Vitalii from Berryland Cidery in Ukraine, Mikkeller and Warpigs teamed up to create an unversioned beer to help them rebuild their cidery following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Derived beers
Under its free license, this free beer encourages others to tweak the recipe and redistribute it. Commercial or amateur brewers can reuse the recipe. Known derivatives include: Switzerland/Lausanne: Le Baiser de la Princesse (French for: "The Kiss of the Princess"), in 2008. France/Schiltigheim: Affichage Libre, brewed specially for the 2011 edition of the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (free software meeting) in Strasbourg.