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 beer advertisement
slogan. 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, the
share-alike 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 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 to use, the style of beer being produced (other than being dark and heavy), whether or not to add any
hops, what the
fermentation 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 ==