BrewDog’s open-source revolution is at the vanguard of postcapitalism
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'd say it was a publicity stunt from very effective brand marketers; they might as well have treated "No Logo" as an instruction manual. The Brewdog logo on the bottle matters more than the recipes to its target market, and the counterculture stance is all part of that. Brewdog's advantage over other craft brewers is branding rather than brewing.
And yes, it's also good for publicity when trying to crowdfund from "the misfits, the independents, the libertines”, perhaps because "the financial institutions of the City [which] gave rise to the bastardisation and commoditisation of beer" weren't too keen on their 115x revenue valuation. Nice of the Guardian to take those claims at face value (linked article) too.
But seriously, I'm struggling to think of anyone in the beer industry that tries to "make money out of keeping beer recipes secret", especially with most of the best-selling beers relying rather less on taste than Brewdog. Coca-cola, of course, famously emphasises their closely guarded recipe, but as with Brewdog's "open source", that's more about the corporate mythology behind the brand than any serious fear that someone might even slightly dent their brand and distribution network by making something that tastes the same rather than merely similar.
One of the obnoxious things I've noticed about capitalism, is that its current incarnation seems to incentivize bait and switch. You develop warm fuzzy feelings about a brand, but then they start to outsource production, or sell their brand to a national brewer. This seems to happen a lot to beer, often with a change of taste and a degradation of product quality. With "open source," at least the customer can homebrew their own and do an AB test.
(Same sort of thing happens with startups, I've also noticed.)
I don't think it is easy for everyone to take the recipe and replicate it.
I also don't think you can easily use the recipe with homebrewing equipment and obtaing the same output, maybe it could be done with professional scale equipment but I am not sure.
To me is a nice marketing stunt aimed at the homebrew community.
Also note that they're open-sourcing the recipes, they're not allowing anyone to reuse the names of their beers.
I can start a company tomorrow selling farm churned butter from the cows that operate at my farm. It is the best butter because every morning I go to the cows and tell them they are the best cows this side of the Mississippi. I churn the butter by hand and sell out a lot of product. However, when I max out the cows on my location, I need to buy more cows for my farm and increase the amount of land or I can ask Farmer Jed next door to talk to his cows in the morning and tell them that his cows are the best cows this side of the Mississippi. Farmer Jed churns the butter by hand, but he forgets to wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom, something I never did like about him, but he tells this great story about him and the milk maid over in Aberdeen.
Multiply my success more and more and finally I am needing thousands of gallons of milk, a centralized processing system to churn the butter and ensure quality control of my brand and then I have a knock on my door from a white glove butter churner. They have gone through the regulatory process with the FDA, have done butter churning for other companies successfully, and have a great track record. I will hand over that portion to them.
This is why the companies start out warm and fuzzy, but regulatory issues, meeting demand, and other fun things cause a drive to outsourced production.
Brewdog's the first one I've seen that's opened up all of this at once, but it is not uncommon (at least in the US) for an American craft brewery to, say, publish a "clone recipe" of one or many of their beers in a homebrew magazine.
It seems that the author, Paul Mason, has recently published a book: Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future. Here's a blurb from a review on Goodreads [1]:
Probably the most critical observation to this theory is that information now forms a huge and growing proportion of the goods and services that make up GDP. Yet it is cannot be priced using standard economic theory, which states that a market is in equilibrium when marginal cost equals marginal benefit. Information has zero marginal cost, as it can be copied infinitely, the only cost involved being the electricity this requires. Moreover, the category of information keeps expanding, to include music, books, films, TV shows, patterns and designs to make or do just about any other thing. Whilst there is obviously a cost to producing this information, that is generally also falling. Only legal structures prevent everyone with an internet connection being able to listen to practically every song, watch practically every film, and read practically every book ever created. Realistically, everyone willing to pirate already does. Business models based on defending copyright are fighting a losing battle, as internet connections get faster, storage cheaper, and files quality better. I have long blamed my comfort with media piracy on A-level economics, which helpfully taught me that a good with zero marginal cost should also be priced at zero. Mason notes that the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ (a concept I am admittedly somewhat dubious of) will expand both the volume and proportion of information in our goods and services. At the moment, the information that we passively create by browsing the web (which certainly feels like a passive activity much of the time) is controlled by state and private monopolies; google and the NSA, broadly. The argument here is all such information should be made more public, in order that it can be used to drive innovation.
Apparently the open sourcing of brewery recipes plays into his thesis and gives him another chance to push a short piece on postcapitalism and the opening up of all data/information as an equal means of production for everyone in the world.
What is not mentioned is the human/physical capital required to produce and distribute something of value with this free information, which will still be just as expensive (if not more expensive) in the future.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24878857-postcapitalism
Your mention of coca-cola reminded me of Ubuntu Cola[2]. I was wondering if they were defunct or not -- the student cantina used to carry them a few years ago -- but I think they stopped after the most recent reorganization. It's a shame, it's a great cola (tastes great) -- and is also a little less bad for the environment (would probably be better if the Cantina made their own Ubuntu Cola... would avoid shipping the heaviest/most abundant part, the water).
Brewdog do have effective brand marketing, so take it with a large pinch of salt; ... but it is not "a recipe", it is in fact 215 recipes; the crown jewels, the other hits and all the other misses as well.
I think it represents a much more interesting vision of "postcapitalism" than just opening up IP. Renting out excess capacity (in a brewery or other production facility) allows IP-only companies to get into the business. Not only has it allowed Mikkeller (and others, including his estranged twin brother) to get into beer with litte or no capex, it's allowed him to operate on different continents, solving another host of problems for working in a global marketplace.
Apply that model to other industries and there could be a Cambrian explosion in innovation and creativity.
http://brulosophy.com/2015/04/06/water-chemistry-pt-1-mash-m...
It's also worth visiting a Mikkeller bar. They have a number of small-run beers on tap and those get rotated frequently. I once had a pilsner that he managed to pack 10% ABV into while still making it taste good.
I feel that IP monopolies are better described as 'corporatism' since those rights are directly proportional to your ability to enforce them with a legal team.
Every exchange, be it of goods, services or ideas, relies on a regulated marketplace.
I believe there is a natural distinction between matter and information. It's obvious in physics and I'm not sure why we feel the need to muddy the water with our legal code.
In contrast, information can be copied and move to new media fairly simply.
If Grandpa's pocket watch were destroyed, you could buy another pocket watch of the same model and vintage, but it really wouldn't be Grandpa's pocket watch. This is one source of friction when estates are settled. In contrast, you could copy all the digital photos of Grandpa and hand them out on USB sticks like party favors.
That means, with some exceptions, to the extent that someone is harmed in information 'theft', it's that their business model was affected (I can't make as much money on Mickey Mouse cartoons!). It seems like a contradiction to me to call it 'capitalism' when government protects particular business models.
That's why I said I prefer to think of IP laws as 'corporatism'.
Sorry if I under-explained things.
Knowledge behaves like capital in many senses. You can pay to acquire it or hire someone who has it, and doing so can help you or your organization to be more productive. Thus in at least some contexts it's useful to refer to it as a type of capital.
Wouldn't that be Mission Impossible style?
Except free-as-in-beer specifically meant you didn't have to pay for the end-product (gratis) but had no rights or idea on the IP, by opposition to free-as-in-freedom (libre) which you may have to pay for but could then use as you wished.
I choose to pay the vendor because I'm lazy and like their SLA.
But don't let that ruin a good open-source vs free-software debate...
A superior light IPA though is Tuatara's "Iti". 3.3% with a good hop bloom, plenty of bite, and not a hint of an off flavour. I suspect they increase the mineral content of the water to give it more bite. I'm drinking one right now. :)
Now a good sub 4% pilsner - that I may never find.
Oi! Brewdog is very much Scottish!
I wish I could remember where I read/saw it, but Musk stated that the goal of Tesla was to make the market shift to EVs, not generate profit. My memory is a bit hazy but I'm pretty sure he even said that after that goal was reached, he didn't care what happened to Tesla. With that in mind, the motivation for opening up patents seems pretty straightforward.
1) economic exchange of resources is achieved through market transactions 2) means of production is privately owned and its availability is discretionary 3) labor is organized in a fashion where economic decisions governing the organization are made by a board of directors
I don't usually nitpick about this, but I felt that this was really poor phrasing. If they want to discuss the evolution of "open source", it's just not ok to be so hand-wavy, and before getting to Linux, they should mention GNU and the GPL.
I imagine I'll have a lot of failures though, before I start producing anything decent - can the quantities given be lessened, e.g. quartered, and still get the same taste result?
You also have to advantage over microbreweries to be more creative and test out stuff in your recipes because making 5 gallons of not so perfect beer is not the end of the world. All the professional brewers I know were homebrewers before and still are.
The next step after would be taking recipes, either from the kits you already made, or found elsewhere, and assembling the ingredients yourself, tweaking where you want to make a change.
Recipes are equipment and process dependent, and don't scale in a perfectly linear fashion but those are refinement.
Grab a copy of Papazian's The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing and "relax, don't worry and have a homebrew"
I started with "kit and kilo" kits, which are almost impossible to mess up (really just add a can of concentrated pre-hopped wort and a kilo of sugar or dextrose to 5 gallons of water, cool it down and throw yeast in). If you want to just experiment, that's a relatively low cost and simple way to start. It's easy to scale up from there too - to either extract brewing with dried concentrated wort, or even all-grain brewing, where you're working directly with malted barley and other grains.)
A lot of people will suggest starting with all-grain from the start, but I found graduating up to that allowed me to master some of the basics (sanitation, fermentation temps, etc), without having too much to focus on at once.
(The answer is no)
Some of the more exotic hops could be hard to find but they can be substituted.
Bismarck (Sink The)[0] :)
I'm impressed they specifically noted the tactical nuclear penguin could be made in a standard domestic freezer, and I love the cheeky note on the End of History
> You'll have to get this one all the way down to -70°C. Taxidermy is not optional.
[0] after the WWII battleship, as part of their "feud" with german brewery Schorschbrau over the "world's strongest beer"
It’s not a good drink, I think they only made it for the bragging rights.
Sure people won't have the same conicals etc, which might alter the taste somewhat but surely following the recipes will give a fairly close approximation.
More information.. I feel like they leave out a lot of timing from the recipes. Just two temperatures for each beer? How do they add the stuff from twist? For how long? How do they kill fermentation? etc...
They are vague on boil time. The homebrewing standard is 60 minutes (as that is a good length for extracting bitterness out of hops). In some recipes, it's good to boil longer to get extra kettle caramelization. So, yes, it would've been nice for them to provide that.
Generally speaking, homebrewers don't "kill fermentation". Instead they let the yeast naturally settle after bottling (often adding a little sugar so that the yeast naturally carbonates the beer in the bottle as well). Kegging and force carbonating is also an option (most homebrew stores sell old style 5 gallon soda kegs for this purpose). If so, people may use finings in the secondary to help clarity. A few even filter but it's not very common from what I see. Pasteurizing at a homebrew level is unheard of. If Brewdog is a typical craft brewery, they probably don't pasteurize either, but they filter.
There are a few things that Brewdog leaves out that will lead to a slightly different tasting beer. There's no alpha acid percentages marked for the hops for instance, or an overall bittering standard (which means that variations in the hop crop might lead to slightly different bittering levels). They don't provide specifics on their water profile that I see, which will make a subtle difference. Their hop addition timing is a little vague ("beginning", "middle", etc. -- it may not be clear to a non-homebrewer, but these describe when in the boil to add the hops) Even something trivial like not providing the names of the maltsters mean an exact clone is not possible (a crystal malt from one company is not the exact same thing as a crystal malt from another company).
Still, you can get in the ballpark I'm sure, and if one was dedicated enough could adjust the brew on their system to come close.
And how would one define "Capitalism 2.0"/"post-capitalism" as a better version of traditional capitalism, which often has worse connotations?
Are they? I don't think I've ever heard that! Uber is almost one of the most traditionally capitalist organisations possible!
In old fashioned industrial revolution terms the infrastructure is the loom, the driver network is the cloth it produces.
I would even place WordPress on that list - a tool that is perfectly usable and has all the features of the paid product, given away for free. I've used it for years and never paid a cent for it.