Free Beer is a beer brand collaboration between students of IT University of Copenhagen and the artist collective Superflex initiated in 2004. The recipe of the beer is published under a

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bu ...

, granting others the right to freely use and distribute it.

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 Carlsberg may refer to: Places * Carlsberg (district), a district in Copenhagen, Denmark ** Carlsberg station, its train station * Carlsberg, Germany, a municipality in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany * Carlsberg Fjord, Greenland Other uses * Carlsbe ...

beer advertisement

slogan A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a clan or a political, commercial, religious, or other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose, with the goal of persuading members of the public or a more defined target group ...

. 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 A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

, the

share-alike Share-alike is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Copyleft li ...

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." 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. 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.'”

Recipe

The first Vores Øl recipe drew criticism from the

homebrewing Homebrewing is the brewing of beer or other alcoholic beverages on a small scale for personal, non-commercial purposes. Supplies, such as kits and fermentation tanks, can be purchased locally at specialty stores or online. Beer was brewed dom ...

community for its lack of necessary instructions. Community members were concerned the recipe had not outlined how much water to use in the mash, what type of

yeast Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom (biology), kingdom. The first yeast originated hundreds of millions of years ago, and at least 1,500 species are currently recognized. They are est ...

to use, the style of beer being produced (other than being dark and heavy), whether or not to add any hops, what the

fermentation Fermentation is a type of anaerobic metabolism which harnesses the redox potential of the reactants to make adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and organic end products. Organic molecules, such as glucose or other sugars, are catabolized and reduce ...

temperature should be, or how the beer was supposed to taste. 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. The amount of sugar has been decreased by 90% to improve the quality of the beer.

Derivatives

Known derivatives using the free license include: *

Lausanne Lausanne ( , ; ; ) is the capital and largest List of towns in Switzerland, city of the Swiss French-speaking Cantons of Switzerland, canton of Vaud, in Switzerland. It is a hilly city situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, about halfway bet ...

, Switzerland: ''Le Baiser de la Princesse'' (French for "The Kiss of the Princess"), in 2008. * Schiltigheim, France: ''Affichage Libre'', brewed for the 2011 edition of the Libre Software Meeting in

Strasbourg Strasbourg ( , ; ; ) is the Prefectures in France, prefecture and largest city of the Grand Est Regions of France, region of Geography of France, eastern France, in the historic region of Alsace. It is the prefecture of the Bas-Rhin Departmen ...

Reception

Free Beer has received coverage in international print and

digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, an ...

. The brand has been discussed in books on copyright. The project been written about by figures in the

free software movement The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for user (computing), software users, namely the freedoms to run, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets thes ...

, including

Cory Doctorow Cory Efram Doctorow (; born 17 July 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog ''Boing Boing''. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of th ...

and

Lawrence Lessig Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvar ...

. In 2005, Superflex interviewed

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

on the project. Free Beer has been distributed at technology conferences, including Summit 2008 and RMLL 2011, 2012, and 2014. The

FSCONS Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) is a Nordic conference trying to bridge the gap between software and cultural freedom held each autumn in Gothenburg, Sweden. It shares many similarities with FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software ...

2008 resulted in an

ebook An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...

that featured Free Beer. Free Beer was also exhibited in art exhibitions and museums, such as the Art Basel Miami Beach 2006, the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands in 2007, and the Taipei Biennial 2010.

Gallery

Voresol label medium.png, Original Free Beer 1.0 label "Vores Øl" (2004) Free beer bottles.jpg, Free Beer bottles based on recipe and label variants created since 2005

References

External links

Original website (archived)

Official website

Superflex page

FreeBrewers GitHub page
* FreeBeer v1.2 (2009 book PDF) {{Danish beer Beer brands of Denmark Beer in Denmark Food and drink introduced in 2004 Creative Commons-licensed works Open content projects