Free Beer is a beer brand collaboration between students of IT University of Copenhagen[1] and the artist collective Superflex initiated in 2004. The recipe of the beer is published under a Creative Commons license, granting others the right to freely use and distribute it.[2][3]
Free Beer "St Austell" (version 3.2) (2007).Superflex Workshop at the "Free Beer Factory" event at the Taipei Biennial 2010 in Taipei, Taiwan[4]Free Beer on sale at the iSummit 2008 Sapporo in Japan sold for 500yen.[5]Anti-copyright display with a "Free Beer version 3.2 St. Austell" mascot and a sign reading "Copyright is preventing access to knowledge" (2007)
History
Vores Øl
In December 2004, a group of students from the IT University of Copenhagen, in partnership with Superflex, brewed a batch of beer in the university's cafeteria. The group named the beer "Vores Øl" (Danish for "Our Beer"), inspired by a 1994 Carlsberg beer advertisement slogan. They launched a website to promote the project and released the beer’s recipe and label design under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.5 license. Since cooking recipes are not protected by copyright, the share-alike licensing approach used is legally questionable and had not been tested in any court of law.
Free Beer
The developers of the beer stated that they wanted to raise awareness of the "dogmatic notions of copyright and intellectual property that are dominating our culture."[6] The group admitted to having limited experience with beer production. After the first batch of the open-source beer was brewed, Superflex continued developing the concept under the name "Free Beer" and designed a new label. Inspired by colourful aesthetics of the 1960s, it was meant to further underline the concept of freedom.[7] The name Free Beer is a play on Richard Stallman's quote about free software being “'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'”[8]
Recipe
The first Vores Øl recipe drew criticism from the homebrewing community for its lack of necessary instructions.[9] Community members were concerned the recipe 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, what the fermentation temperature should be, or how the beer was supposed to taste.[10]
Due to the free availability of the recipe, the recipe has been changed several times. Major Free Beer recipe iterations (v3.0 and v4.0) were developed in collaboration with a Danish brewery, Skands, in Brøndby.[11][12] The amount of sugar has been decreased by 90% to improve the quality of the beer.
^Koch, Rasmus (2007-01-01). "Free Beer". Rasmus Koch Studio. Retrieved 2015-08-24. FREE BEER refers to information freedom, not economic freedom. [...] Designing a visual program for an idea [...] builds on a vivid and colorful reference to 60's liberation."
