Free Beer

I searched the forum before posting this and didnt see it mentioned.
http://www.freebeer.org
Has anyone seen this or tried any version of the recipe? I think it looks interesting.

We've talked about open source beer on here at least once.

At the time I recall seeing a thread covering it, my initial reaction was that the resulting beer would be muddied because of the "too many cooks in the kitchen" aspect of it, but at that time the idea was just kind of being kicked around and no real procedure had been decided regarding how changes would eventually make it into the "official" recipe.

No two brewers are going to produce the same beer even when following the same recipe, so individuals' opinions of what needs to change in the recipe are biased because of the actual beer they produced. In other words, if 10 people brew a recipe, those 10 people will think 25 different things need to change in the recipe.

If you submit that to the master recipe maintainer, he might try some of the suggestions, get his own beer that is (again) unlike the beer anyone else brewed, and will have a biased opinion on which suggestions make it into the newest revision.

It's a geeky idea, which is fine (I'm a geek from way back), but I think it's no more than that.

The way I see it working is just like an equivalent software project. Anyone is free to take the source code (recipe) , modify it (or not) and compile it (brew it) for personal or business use as long as they make the modifications available to the community. The community doesnt have to accept the modifications, but some other individual may be able to work off of them for their own modifications that would then be made available etc. Over time certain modifications would be accepted by the community and lead to a new version or fork project.

jacob1484 said:

The way I see it working is just like an equivalent software project. Anyone is free to take the source code (recipe) , modify it (or not) and compile it (brew it) for personal or business use as long as they make the modifications available to the community. The community doesnt have to accept the modifications, but some other individual may be able to work off of them for their own modifications that would then be made available etc. Over time certain modifications would be accepted by the community and lead to a new version or fork project.

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Yes, that makes sense for software, where your computer and my computer basically get the same results when running the same version of a program.

But, your brewery (and process) and my brewery (and process) will not get the same results when brewing the same recipe. Heck, I'm betting that your brewery on Tuesday vs. your brewery on Wednesday won't even get the same results unless you've got some crazy high tech system that allows you to control everything with incredible accuracy.

It's these inherent batch-to-batch, brewer-to-brewer, day-to-day differences that I think would make it hard for a consensus to be reached on version upgrades to a beer recipe.

Walker said:

...snip...
It's these inherent batch-to-batch, brewer-to-brewer, day-to-day differences that I think would make it hard for a consensus to be reached on version upgrades to a beer recipe.

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There doesn't necessarily need to be a general consensus on upgrades to a recipe. A small group or a single person controls the base project and does as they see fit. If someone doesn't like it they create a fork that they can control and so on... that's how we ended up with 100+ linux distributions haha

Aside from all that, the recipe on freebeer.org looks interesting with the guarana and all that.

I'm not trying dissuade you from brewing it. Have at it, man! :rockin:

I was just stating my opinion about how I think it's nearly impossible to weight the value of any contributors' enhancement to the recipe since the beer that he based his opinion/enhancement on is potentially nothing like the beer that the controlling person(s) brew(s) to judge said enhancement.

It's a cool idea for sure. I just see it as practically infeasible to execute properly.

Yeah, it seems no different from the recipe forum here. Ed offers up a recipe, ten billion people brew it and most probably make slight modifications.

But mushrooms and stuff? Um.

I get what they're trying to do and I get that it's a play off the old "free as in speech" vs "free as in beer" distinction, but "open source beer" has always kind of irked me because recipes are not copyrightable.