zeg
Well-Known Member
Recipes are protected by copyright laws as long as you have it in a fixed form. IE. Not in your head.
Except it's not the recipe that is protected, it is the expression of that recipe as something more than a list of ingredients. (http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html) There are very few beer recipes that are likely to meet this standard, as the processes are so standard that even a written description is unlikely to be "creative."
Even if you did have a copyrightable recipe, again, the combination of ingredients and the process for making it are not copyrightable. Anyone who knows the recipe is free to make the beer, but they could not produce a copy of the beer recipe. (An unadorned rephrasing of a copyrightable recipe might be considered a derivative work, even if the rewrite wasn't copyrightable in itself---I'm not sure.)
For a recipe, copyright protection is of little value.