Vores Øl
Encyclopedia
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
: Vores øl) is the first brand of beer
Beer
Beer is the world's most widely consumed andprobably oldest alcoholic beverage; it is the third most popular drink overall, after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of sugars, mainly derived from malted cereal grains, most commonly malted barley and malted wheat...
with a "free" recipe - free as in "freedom"
Gratis versus Libre
Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective "free"; namely, "for zero price" and "with little or no restriction"...
, taken after the term "free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
". The name "Free Beer" is a play on Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
's common explanation that free software is "free as in speech, not free as in beer." The recipe is published under a Creative Commons license
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons licenses are several copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S...
, specifically the Attribution-ShareAlike license.
The beer was created by students at the IT-University in Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...
together with Superflex
Superflex
SUPERFLEX is a Danish artists' group founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. Superflex describe their projects as Tools, as proposals that invite people to actively participate in and communicate the development of experimental models that alter the prevailing...
, a Copenhagen-based artist collective, to illustrate how concepts of the free software movement
Free software movement
The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...
might be applied outside the digital world.
Original recipe
The students brewed the first 100 litre batch instructed by Kjeld Erlandsen, titled 'version 1.0', of the dark heavy beer in the school cafeteria, and created label designs and a website to promote the beer and publish the recipe.Almost immediately, many from the homebrewing
Homebrewing
Homebrewing is the brewing of beer, wine, sake, mead, cider, perry and other beverages through fermentation on a small scale as a hobby for personal consumption, free distribution at social gatherings, amateur brewing competitions or other non-commercial reasons...
community spoke out against the quality of the recipe, several posting to a Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
thread. Most notable among the complaints were that it was never stated how much water to use in the mash, what type of yeast was to be used, the style of beer being produced (other than being dark and heavy), whether or not any hops were being added for aroma, fermentation
Fermentation (food)
Fermentation in food processing typically is the conversion of carbohydrates to alcohols and carbon dioxide or organic acids using yeasts, bacteria, or a combination thereof, under anaerobic conditions. Fermentation in simple terms is the chemical conversion of sugars into ethanol...
temperature, or how the beer was supposed to taste. Making reference to the technical problems of when software instructions ("source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
") cannot be made into a functioning program, several people have said that if this recipe were source code, it would not compile
Compiler
A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
.
Rasmus Nielsen, one of the developers of the beer, has stated that the beer was a medium for the message of "dogmatic notions of copyright and intellectual property that are dominating our culture." He also admitted that the group was not made up of beer gurus and that their experience in beer production was limited. Because of the underlying theme of the group's message, the correction and development of this recipe is actively encouraged.
The recipe has now reached version 4.0, and corrects most of the above mistakes. The quality of the beer also improved, since the amount of sugar in it decreased by 90%.
Derived beers
Under its free license, this free beer encourages others to tweak the recipe and redistribute it. Commercial or amateur brewers are able to reuse the recipe. Known derivatives include:- Switzerland : Le Baiser de la Princesse.
- France : Affichage Libre, brewed specially for the 2011 edition of the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre (free softwareFree softwareFree software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
meeting)