kitlab. WTF?

I just saw this on my local news. Selling recipes for profit?!!! Thank God we have HBT for recipes + fantastic advice!!! Google "kitlab" if you want for more info. I think it's maybe another kickstarter garbage idea. In my opinion, it's taking advantage of newer brewers. Although maybe not as bad as companies like NB. Same principle, I guess...


I seriously need to stop perusing Fox news. Pisses me off every time.

Couple screenshots that might disturb some (including our favorite lady mod... unless she's involved... which I doubt.)

Namin' & Shamin' like a boss!!! :

What I've gathered from the Kickstarter page is that they're putting kits together in concert with the recipe creators, who receive a cut of the sales of their recipe kits. I haven't seen this interview, but if he's selling Yooper's recipes as kits, it's probably with her permission and to her benefit.

As for taking advantage of brewers, tons of brewers want the convenience of a ready-made kit for their brews, otherwise they wouldn't be so popular. Creating a platform that allows brewers to get a cut of their recipe sales - as opposed to other brew shops, many of which almost certainly use borrowed recipes but none of which, to my knowledge, share any of the proceeds with the recipe designers - seems like a positive thing to me.

If I'm wrong about their business model, sue me, but that's how I've understood what they're doing, and if that's the case, I can totally get behind it.

I wish they would have at least mentioned HBT.



Although I guess rapists don't like to make eye contact with their victims.





That's right. I said it.

If Yooper stops in and says she's part of it, then great! More power to that fantastic lady! Just mention HBT for good measure.


Otherwise, it's another person (Ryan) taking advantage of this fantastic website and gaining a profit... which is unfair to the guys who give us HBT and all it's wonders.

Especially hurtful at the tail end of this years HBT fundraiser...


Edit: I messaged Austin & Mrs. Yoop for further clarification. For all I know, this thread could be deleted in 15 min. if Big Brother steps in...

*puts on tinfoil hat and hides in the shower*


Edit #2: The lovely Yooper informed me she and hbt have nothing to do with it.

Thread here from Kitlab:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=519798

FatDragon said:

What I've gathered from the Kickstarter page is that they're putting kits together in concert with the recipe creators, who receive a cut of the sales of their recipe kits. I haven't seen this interview, but if he's selling Yooper's recipes as kits, it's probably with her permission and to her benefit.

As for taking advantage of brewers, tons of brewers want the convenience of a ready-made kit for their brews, otherwise they wouldn't be so popular. Creating a platform that allows brewers to get a cut of their recipe sales - as opposed to other brew shops, many of which almost certainly use borrowed recipes but none of which, to my knowledge, share any of the proceeds with the recipe designers - seems like a positive thing to me.

If I'm wrong about their business model, sue me, but that's how I've understood what they're doing, and if that's the case, I can totally get behind it.

Click to expand...

Great! Sounds good!

Except, who's to say this Ryan guy can't say the recipes are all his and collect all the possible profits and screw over the true beer lovers who give the recipes away for free to further brewing brotherhood/sisterhood? Change the amount of crystal by 5% and you've got a new recipe! Ta Da! It may look like a great idea, one that can certainly benefit members of this community. Unfortunately, I'm a half-empty kind of guy... especially when this knowledge is available to everyone in the friggin' world free of charge!

Now if they can offer the recipe and ingredients cheaper than the other companies that gouge small time brewers... I'm all for this! But again, I highly doubt it.

The human element will always reign supreme...

Pkrd said:

Thread here from Kitlab:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=519798

Click to expand...

Thanks for the post!

The poster in that thread Orangehero has the same type of questions I have.

All I see is a way for someone to take advantage of this fantastic community...


Edit: The guy hasn't responded to questions about the campaign in his hbt thread at all (over a month) even though that's exactly why he claims to have made the thread...

k1ngl1ves said:

Thanks for the post!

The poster in that thread Orangehero has the same type of questions I have.

All I see is a way for someone to take advantage of this fantastic community...

Click to expand...

It's certainly hard to regulate recipes being posted by the people who really ought to benefit from their sales (i.e. the recipe developers), and I hope that they have some kind of verification figured into their business model, but the overall plan still seems positive.

I'm sure kits will at least initially cost more than NB, LD Carlson, and the other big suppliers because Kitlab won't likely start with the same kind of volume they have - same reason Walmart is cheaper than a local corner store - but done right, this business model has the potential to help homebrewers (some more than others), so I'm optimistic until I see reason to feel otherwise.

Seems like a cool idea, especially for those who don't buy grain in bulk, or who don't live close to a LHBS. Otherwise, a person is stuck buying at least a pound of each specialty grain in a recipe, plus larger quantities of base grains. If they don't have room to store grains, this becomes a real pain.

Having the ability to pick from many online recipes rather than just a few kits available online, without having to purchase excess grain is a great idea IMO.

Personally, I buy my grain in bulk and keep a few hundred pounds on hand at any given time, so this doesn't interest me. However, I can see how it would be beneficial to many.

Happy to see us in the shots, not so happy they didn't even bother to include the HomeBrewTalk logo and point people in our direction.

Kind of conflicted there, but you know, the more brewers the better!

k1ngl1ves said:

Great! Sounds good!

Except, who's to say this Ryan guy can't say the recipes are all his and collect all the possible profits and screw over the true beer lovers who give the recipes away for free to further brewing brotherhood/sisterhood? Change the amount of crystal by 5% and you've got a new recipe! Ta Da! It may look like a great idea, one that can certainly benefit members of this community. Unfortunately, I'm a half-empty kind of guy... especially when this knowledge is available to everyone in the friggin' world free of charge!

Now if they can offer the recipe and ingredients cheaper than the other companies that gouge small time brewers... I'm all for this! But again, I highly doubt it.

The human element will always reign supreme...

Click to expand...

It's only a recipe. Lots of commercial breweries freely give out their recipes. Guess what...then you can brew them and NOT BUY their beer. Or better yet another commercial brewery can brew the exact recipe and call it "their" beer.
I think Kitlab is a great idea for brewers who rely on prepackaged kits.

Looks like they are not aiming to take credit from anyone

Kit Lab Kickstarter:
"Authors retain 100% ownership over their work and can control how and when it is used in perpetuity. So when you post on the site, you agree to let us sell ingredient kits based on your work, but you are in no way agreeing that we have any sort of ownership over the work itself. So if you have the #1 most popular kit on the whole site and decide that you don’t want to sell it any more, that is your prerogative. You own us, not the other way around."

Click to expand...

I think that it is not a bad idea, the question would be- how much is tacked on to the kit to cover the consignment?

Not as offended by this as the OP, but I'm not surprised that it's only about 12% funded with only 5 days to go.

Sure, being able to order exactly the ingredients you need would be nice, but it's hard for me to see how kitlab can make money here without the kits being fairly expensive. There's plenty of variation in how people would want their kits customized. (Adjusted for efficiency, scaled for size, change hops, remove yeast if harvesting from a previous batch, on and on) With lots of customization comes lots of effort in packing the kits, and plenty of potential for errors. If this was an easy task, existing online vendors would have jumped on it by now. You can get kits from NB and plenty of others without this level of customization as well.

Kicking $1/gal back to the recipe author is a nice touch, and will certainly get people to add recipes to your site, but I don't think it's enough to launch an entire business out of, and clearly not enough kickstarter backers think so.

Their recipes. They aren't "Secret Recipes".

You can't patent a recipe. If anyone posts a recipe on HBT anyone can copy, use, sell that recipe.

Personally I don't think the kitlab idea is going to work well, but it is kind of different.

Part of learning about homebrewing is learning how to take a recipe from the Internet, or any other source, and customize it for your OWN brewery. if that's not being done, the recipes wont' likely work perfectly (All Grain, anyway...)

Post #3 here says @yooper did not know they were using a recipe she has posted:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=523074

How did these guys get on the news?

Hello said:

Post #3 here says @yooper did not know they were using a recipe she has posted:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=523074

How did these guys get on the news?

Click to expand...

Probably a local news feed promoting a local business start-up.

Not surprised Yooper recipe was shown. She has quite a few very popular recipes listed.

Provided they list each kit's ingredients publicly on the site and have a decent customer support department, it should be easy enough to police the trolls – Yoop writes in, says "hey, man, this 'schmooper's oatmeal stout' looks an awful lot like this recipe I posted that's been getting rave reviews for half a decade [link to HBT post]," they remove the offending kit. I'm sure Etsy, CafePress, etc. deal with this issue all the time, and show that it's at least possible, if not inevitable, to run this kind of business model as a den of creativity rather than a den of iniquity.

I'd be more interested in what they work out from a logistical standpoint – all the malts, all the hops, pretty much every order different from every other order and random-ass quantities of everything – if they can figure that out without sending a bunch of poor schmucks a pound of Marris Otter and seven pounds of oats by mistake, I'll be pretty impressed.

brulosopher is in on this thing, and he seems like a pretty down to earth guy. maybe someone should ask him what it's about.

i think the main thing is that if you put a recipe on there, it's a lot like amazon. once you've purchased that recipe, you're asked to review it. so if yooper puts a kit on there, then everyone knows yooper and is likely to buy that recipe because of the name attached. then if some idiot goes on there and puts up basically the exact same recipe, for it to even get much viewership, the owner of that recipe would have to get a lot of people to go buy it and like it. i'm not 100% clear on that whole model they're using, but it's something to that extent. the more popular recipes will be the ones that are more viewable.

Yooper could sell a bunch of kits.

But recipes aren't patentable. If you get your recipe in there first, then I don't see how anyone could copy it and allow it to be sold under your name.

Again, I'm not sure how it would work. I mean, the recipes are already out there in Internetland. Anyone with half a brain could copy a recipe from this site and many others. This is really a service to provide ingredients for those recipes at an additional cost.

Is there a demand for that service?

We'll see.

I suspect that "if" this thing goes live then Ryan will become inundated with;

-Claims of plagiarism. To wit he will either take a stance that the first to publish gets the payout, or he will spend more time verifying recipes than he will selling them.

or

- Someone will create a bot, or something like, to collect and upload recipes in bulk in which Ryan will spend more time deleting recipes than selling them.

GilaMinumBeer said:

I suspect that "if" this thing goes live then Ryan will become inundated with;

-Claims of plagiarism. To wit he will either take a stance that the first to publish gets the payout, or he will spend more time verifying recipes than he will selling them.

or

- Someone will create a bot, or something like, to collect and upload recipes in bulk in which Ryan will spend more time deleting recipes than selling them.

Click to expand...

yeah i guess there could be a problem when a bigger name in the homebrew world steals some random new brewers recipe. but i doubt the majority will do something like that. but i suppose there is always some percentage of greedy ******** in every aspect of life.

couldn't the bot be easily trapped by some kind of human verification system before a recipe will be posted?

unfortunately we'll likely not see if there is a demand for such a service, as i doubt it will go live at this point. but as for the basic concept of it, i gotta be honest, i really like it.

Homercidal said:

Yooper could sell a bunch of kits.

But recipes aren't patentable. If you get your recipe in there first, then I don't see how anyone could copy it and allow it to be sold under your name.

Again, I'm not sure how it would work. I mean, the recipes are already out there in Internetland. Anyone with half a brain could copy a recipe from this site and many others. This is really a service to provide ingredients for those recipes at an additional cost.

Is there a demand for that service?

We'll see.

Click to expand...

If it were just a service to compile recipes for a 1-click type purchase there would be no issue. And, I think there "could" be a demand for the convenience of such a thing.

But the aspect of the author receiving a payout of "$1 per gallon per each kit sold" is going to create a potential **** storm of issues for Ryan to deal with.

I'm sure you have to submit to a real person who verifies the recipe is at least plausible and they can stock the ingredients.

THEN it will be published.

But I may be wrong.

joshesmusica said:

yeah i guess there could be a problem when a bigger name in the homebrew world steals some random new brewers recipe. but i doubt the majority will do something like that. but i suppose there is always some percentage of greedy ******** in every aspect of life.

couldn't the bot be easily trapped by some kind of human verification system before a recipe will be posted?

unfortunately we'll likely not see if there is a demand for such a service, as i doubt it will go live at this point. but as for the basic concept of it, i gotta be honest, i really like it.

Click to expand...

I like the idea, minus the payout. Without the payout to the author there is no incentive to take advantage of the concept. And as such, if someone uploads a recipe there is less likelihood they will take credit for it if it is not their creation.

The problem I worry about is that people who share and collaborate publicly on recipes here and other home brewing communities, will suddenly become more closed and secretive, and only publish to Kit Lab hoping to cash in, rather than share and openly discuss changes, tweaks, ideas, improvements etc. These are the aspects that make HBT great.

Homercidal said:

Probably a local news feed promoting a local business start-up.

Click to expand...

Chicago news and California startup. I'm guessing that if the guy spent as much time working on his startup as he did promoting his kickstarter he'd be in a better situation right now. <insert general comments about a kickstarter bubble and the goofy crap that gets funded on there>

feinbera said:

Provided they list each kit's ingredients publicly on the site and have a decent customer support department, it should be easy enough to police the trolls – Yoop writes in, says "hey, man, this 'schmooper's oatmeal stout' looks an awful lot like this recipe I posted that's been getting rave reviews for half a decade [link to HBT post]," they remove the offending kit. I'm sure Etsy, CafePress, etc. deal with this issue all the time, and show that it's at least possible, if not inevitable, to run this kind of business model as a den of creativity rather than a den of iniquity.

I'd be more interested in what they work out from a logistical standpoint – all the malts, all the hops, pretty much every order different from every other order and random-ass quantities of everything – if they can figure that out without sending a bunch of poor schmucks a pound of Marris Otter and seven pounds of oats by mistake, I'll be pretty impressed.

Click to expand...

Policing the trolls, reviewing recipes, this all takes time, and the only revenue stream I see comes from markup of kits, which is why it seems like the kits will be overpriced.

Agreed on the mess that kit fulfillment will be. That isn't going to be minimum wage work, too complex when every order is different.

joshesmusica said:

brulosopher is in on this thing, and he seems like a pretty down to earth guy. maybe someone should ask him what it's about.

i think the main thing is that if you put a recipe on there, it's a lot like amazon. once you've purchased that recipe, you're asked to review it. so if yooper puts a kit on there, then everyone knows yooper and is likely to buy that recipe because of the name attached. then if some idiot goes on there and puts up basically the exact same recipe, for it to even get much viewership, the owner of that recipe would have to get a lot of people to go buy it and like it. i'm not 100% clear on that whole model they're using, but it's something to that extent. the more popular recipes will be the ones that are more viewable.

Click to expand...

I would guess that kitlab reached out to a bunch of brewers with publicly posted recipes and asked if the brewer would allow their recipe to be used on kitlabs site and outlined the $1/lb revenue plan. Easy for a brewer to agree to this since the recipe is already public and they have no effort on their end, just the potential for a few bucks sent their way. Kitlab then used their names on the kickstarter page.

I also think it's a bit odd that they list another homebrew kit website as being another buisness of the kitlab owner. But if you look at any kit on that website, it says:

betterbeerkits.com said:

NOTICE: We've pressed pause on Better Beer Kits to run the Kit Lab Kicksterter campaign at www.kitlab.co.
We'll return in May 2015. Thanks!

Click to expand...

Clearly their existing business isn't very profitable if they will "press pause" to promote a kickstarter that is looking for $45k in funding.

Homercidal said:

I'm sure you have to submit to a real person who verifies the recipe is at least plausible and they can stock the ingredients.

THEN it will be published.

But I may be wrong.

Click to expand...

Even still, I think it will be a bigger deal than Ryan is prepared to handle as there will be no shortage of creative minds looking at an easy income.

It may very well be outlined on their kickstarter, but I wonder how they're allocating the $45k. I assume they intend to have a warehouse of ingredients.

Hello said:

It may very well be outlined on their kickstarter, but I wonder how they're allocating the $45k. I assume they intend to have a warehouse of ingredients.

Click to expand...

Kinda seems like they would already have that for their betterbeerkits.com website, doesn't it?

TallDan said:

Kinda seems like they would already have that for their betterbeerkits.com website, doesn't it?

Click to expand...

Yup. Which makes me wonder what the $45k is supposed to go to. It's a lofty goal which will not be reached, as far as I can tell

My guess, purely speculation, is that since they already have an established business for selling the kits (betterbeerkits.com), they will just need to develop software and a platform to be able to allow authors to register their recipes and track purchases and payouts. Different that just plain shopping cart software for a purely retail business. Also marketing and other start-up costs?

They're only at 11% of goal with 5 days left.

fimpster said:

My guess, purely speculation, is that since they already have an established business for selling the kits (betterbeerkits.com), they will just need to develop software and a platform to be able to allow authors to register their recipes and track purchases and payouts. Different that just plain shopping cart software for a purely retail business. Also marketing and other start-up costs?

They're only at 11% of goal with 5 days left.

Click to expand...

So, uh, given the fact that the guy doing the kickstarter claims to be the web designer behind lulus.com is he paying himself $45k to improve his own business's website?

Again, seems like his time would be better spent on his existing business than on promoting a kickstarter campaign.

He's not paying himself... he's asking the public to pay him. lol

Can I has you recipes? Give you a dollar!

If a recipe is shared publicly then there's nothing to steal. You would be getting paid for bringing the recipe to them, it doesn't matter if you wrote it or not. Any kind of "policing" would be arbitrary. The scheme is to get other people to find the best recipes for his homebrew supply website instead of finding those recipes or creating new ones himself. Obviously he needs something better than his "betterbeerkits".

One could easily and perfectly legally start a new website selling homebrew kits but just use the kitlab recipes without having to pay the submitters or authors of the recipes.

orangehero said:

If a recipe is shared publicly then there's nothing to steal. You would be getting paid for bringing the recipe to them, it doesn't matter if you wrote it or not. Any kind of "policing" would be arbitrary. The scheme is to get other people to find the best recipes for his homebrew supply website instead of finding those recipes or creating new ones himself. Obviously he needs something better than his "betterbeerkits".

One could easily and perfectly legally start a new website selling homebrew kits but just use the kitlab recipes without having to pay the submitters or authors of the recipes.

Click to expand...

Really? So you see no problem with me making money off "Denny's Rye IPA" or any other recipe? What if I were to take all the recipes out of Brewing Classic Styles and upload them?

I think I'd be hesitant to "invest" in a business that is like the current business that seems to be struggling. Or maybe it's flourishing and they have done so well that they can close shop for a bit to garner interest for their next venture. Me, I can hardly take a couple of weeks off work without the **** hitting the fan and I'm far from important at my job.

Hello said:

I think I'd be hesitant to "invest" in a business that is like the current business that seems to be struggling. Or maybe it's flourishing and they have done so well that they can close shop for a bit to garner interest for their next venture. Me, I can hardly take a couple of weeks off work without the **** hitting the fan and I'm far from important at my job.

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I placed an order with betterbeerkits.com, 2 weeks ago, and still don't have a shipping confirmation. Anyone know what's up?

Teromous said:

Really? So you see no problem with me making money off "Denny's Rye IPA" or any other recipe? What if I were to take all the recipes out of Brewing Classic Styles and upload them?

Click to expand...

I'm not a copyright lawyer but that's how I understand it. Considerations of courtesy and common decency among homebrewers as far as I know are not legally binding. Hence why there are breweries that will not share recipes. To use your example, once Denny shared his Rye IPA recipe anyone was and is free to make money off it. It's not like he can demand to get paid any time someone uses it.

My regular online home brew shops will happily crush and pack grain in 10g increments. Some do some hops that way too.
They still don't offer to scale their kits online but when I email them they are happy to provide half size kits.
So I don't see how kitlab is really useful here. Also it's nice to adjust recipes yourself so you feel like you have some input. In the same way that I have to crack a few eggs when making a cake out of a box.
What would be really useful would be the ability to upload a recipe file from your brew software and create an order from that ( using grain and hop substitution where necessary).