slackerlack
Well-Known Member
Do breweries patent their beer recipes or do they just keep them a secret or do they not even care if everyone knows what it is?
I suppose you could, but I doubt it would make sense from a business standpoint. It would make more sense to treat it as a trade seceret (like cola companies do). To patent a recipe, you are essentially publishing it. Once that cat is out of the bag, it would be difficult to constantly try to protect yourself with patent law.
I'm raising this thread from the dead to ask an add-on question.
Let's say as a homebrewer I come up with a great recipe and the head brewer for a commercial brewery tastes my beer and wants to buy my recipe from me. What options for sale of the recipe do I have?
I guess I could sell the recipe outright. But I don't know how well it would do and therefore I can't judge what it might be worth. For example Stephen King sold the rights to what would become the Shawshank Redemption for a mere $5000.
Could I choose to just make royalties from the beer? For instance, I get $0.50 per beer sold? And if so - what if the brewer decides to stop producing the beer. Does that mean I can take my recipe and sell it to a different brewer? And what if the original brewer wants to start making the beer again? He already has the recipe now! Whats stopping him from brewing it without permission?
Thoughts?
FWIW, this is purely hypothetical, and I have no magical recipe that anyone would want to buy from me.
Well, just to put this out there- if a brewer tastes your beer, and loves it, he can just back to his brewhouse and duplicate it. It's pretty easy to do, even if the ingredients aren't exactly the same. Of course, unless you were using something really unusual (a friend used bog myrtle), that is.
If he offered to buy it, I'd sell it. It's pretty much worthless, so if you could get money for it it would be a great deal. It's not like a book or other literary property.
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