Friday Beer Blogging: Open Source Edition

Note: Today's beer blogging is courtesy of a tip from Rich Miller of The Capitol Fax Blog.

First it was software and now beer has gone open source. I present Linux Beer! Kidding...it's actually called Vores Oel and it's from Denmark. The BBC has the story:

The Danes love their beer, but increasingly they are looking beyond the old Danish standby, Carlsberg, to quench their thirst.

Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen are trying to help by releasing what they are calling the world's first open source beer recipe.

It is called Vores Oel, or Our Beer, and the recipe is proving to be a worldwide hit.

The idea behind the beer comes from open source software. This is software whose code is made publicly available for anyone to change and improve, provided that those changes and improvements are then shared in turn.

Basically, the Vores Oel folks provide you with their beer recipe and you can do what you want with it.

Why open source beer? The Vores Oel web site says:

Why not? We all like beer, and as an added bonus there is a legendary quote used to explain the concept of free software (now usually referred to as open source software):

"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free beer".

We think that our open source beer is a nice twist on this quote, and we think it is interesting to see if our beer grows stronger in out in the free and perhaps one day becomes the Linux of beers. Who knows?

Well, I like free speech AND free beer. In fact, the freer the beer, the freer my speech is. And gee, if Miller Lite would just go open source someone might be able to give it some taste.