Free Beer

I'm a bit slow - I should really have heard of Free Beer. "Free as in free speech" as it says on the website.

Free Beer is - in case you as slow as me, an open-source beer brand invented by some Copenhagen IT Students along with Superflex - a Copenhagen art collective. The idea is that the recipe and the branding are open-source, so anybody can use them to make beer and sell it, provided that if they make a change to anything they have to put the changes back in the open-source - which means making it publicly availabe free of charge with the same conditions.

Nice idea - but apparently the early recipes weren't that great. The current one - Version 4.0 (!) looks good though - in fact very good!. For posterity here it is (reproduced with no change to the T's and C's and wotnot)

INGREDIENTS

MALT:
3,8 kg Maris Otter (3,0 SRM)
800 g Munich Malt (7,1 SRM)
200 g Crystal Malt (66,0 SRM)
100 g Brown Malt (95,4 SRM)
80 g Carafa Special Type III (710,7 SRM)
HOPS:
7.48 AAU Northern Brewer hop pellets (FWH.)
(25 g of 8.5% alpha acid)
2.92 AAU Williamette hop pellets (7 min.)
(15 g of 5.5% alpha acid)

SPICE:
35 g Guaraná berries
Crush Guaraná beans and infuse in 1 quart of hot boiled
water (max temperature 78 °C).
Filter the mixture and add to the boiling wort the last 15
minutes.
YEAST:
London Ale (White Labs #WLP013)

STEP BY STEP

Mash crushed grains at 66,0 °C in 13,5 L of water.
Hold mash at 66 °C for 60 minutes.
Heat to 72 °C.
Hold mash at 72 °C for 5 minutes.
Heat to 78 °C.
Hold mash at 78 °C for 10 minutes.
Sparge with 15,5 L of 78 °C water.
Collect 22,7 L of wort.

Now this looks like a good, well balanced recipe - a bit of Munich to give it a silky smoothness and that Carafa III will give it a darker colour - pretty dark in fact. The proportions look very like one of my altbiers - hence the nice red colour in the pic. The Guarana is a bit of an issue - I have no idea where to get raw guarana berries around these parts. They're high in caffeine so this could end up like a beer red bull. Good for a night out!

I might give it a shot and take it into the office one Friday - along with garish labels, but I might just rock the boat and leave that guarana out.