It doesn't really deploy capital in the traditional sense though - it doesn't own its fleet of cars but rather rents them on an adhoc basis. It's very ... neoliberal? Post-Coasian?
Uber is just as capitalist as any other company which requires its workers to buy their own tools (which is rather a lot of them). The trick is that those tools don't actually allow you to perform the work in and of themselves - you still need Uber for a steady source of passengers and for regulatory protection, and the only way you'll get that is wage labour.
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.
Actually, yes (though good luck getting Bizmark down the required temperatures). All the information you need is there and they’ve kindly converted the units into home brew friendly quantities.
Some of the more exotic hops could be hard to find but they can be substituted.
> Actually, yes (though good luck getting Bizmark down the required temperatures).
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"
Never had the occasion to try the Bismarck, I did try the Penguin, approached it as a liquor and I enjoyed it. Given an occasion (and if they restarted production) I'd see myself ordering it again.
What other information do you think they should provide, for people to clone their recipes?
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...
The two temperatures are enough for the basics. Like many homebrewers they probably use single mash infusion for all of their beers. So the first temperature would be the temperature you hold the mash at and they provide the mash length as well. The second temperature is the fermentation temperature.
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.
A hop schedule would be very important for getting the flavor right. The way they describe hop additions is not sufficient, and they don't offer IBU estimates, so we're really only guessing how to get there. So as a brewer, my thought is that these recipes are akin to open source software in a way that allows you to fork it to create something of your own, rather than create a clone of a specific recipe.
BrewDog are one of my favourite breweries! Their collab, Black Tokyo Horizon is the single most interesting (and best, in my opinion) stouts in the world. Amazing to see that the recipes are open-source too, I guess it really is free-as-in-beer!
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 like picking beer company as a fun way to introduce a general audience to the notion of open source and segue into a broader econ discussion. I think a better example though is Tesla freeing up use of their patents for free. Yes there's a cynical reason decipherable (more EVs -> more market) but the way they've done it is pretty open, there's nothing to stop a clever company from competing with them better for being able to use the patented tech. Not having to deal with the lawyers' billables and tying up corporate leaders in legal meetings might be the biggest benefit for them.
> there's nothing to stop a clever company from competing with them
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.
I'm surprised there's no discussion of "Gypsy brewing" in this article. The pioneer of Gpysy brewing, Mikkeller, has brewed beers in collaboration with BrewDog before and Gpysy brewing is counterpart to this "open IP" style of doing business.
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.
Brewdog got lambasted for using another brewery's excess capacity (I think it was Meantime) because people felt that it was less authentic since it "wasn't being brewed by Brewdog". While I don't necessarily agree with this, I thought it was relevant to your comment.
Yeah, it's a silly line, like saying your code isn't authentic if you didn't own the laptop you wrote it on. It's funny the things people will find to pass judgement on.
Well yeah, that's why you use a well-run brewery until you can afford the upkeep of your own. Besides, Meantime is a great brewery. I doubt those concerns - while legitimate - were high on the list with that brewery.
I think water (assuming the brewery is competent/has decent quality control) is a big issue wrt resulting taste. Anything we drink is mostly water after all. This is the only explanation I have for why all the "Japanese" beers one can get outside of Japan taste so awful -- they're all produced on license -- and I assume the recipes are the same. Note I'm talking about industrial beers here -- so hardly the best beers in the world -- but I still think they taste markedly better if you get them in Japan. Could be a consequence of rosy memories, of course.
The really excellent homebrew site brulosophy focuses on doing triangle tests to determine which factors have the strongest influence on the resultant beers - while a shocking number of things they've tested don't reliably produce a noticeable change in the finished product, water chemistry was one of the few where there was a reliably significant difference.
Mikkeller's Beer Geek Brunch Weasel - a stout brewed with civet coffee - is my all-time favorite beer, and I know a thing or two about beer. If you're any kind of beer lover, Mikkeller's beers are not to be missed.
Brunch Weasel is great -- and I don't particularly like stout or any alcoholic beverage mixed with coffee. I get it whenever I see it for breakfast or brunch.
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.
Some of the Belgian contract brewers they use are very interesting. They use electrochemical treatment of water to get it just right for the different styles of beer.
Although they called it a much less romantic name ("contract brewing") back then, Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams) was "gypsy brewing" in 1984, over 20 years before Mikkeller appeared. Brooklyn Brewery started with contract brewing too. I hardly think you can describe Mikkeller as "the pioneer".
> “Oh, and if you are from one of the global beer mega corporations and you are reading this, your computer will spontaneously combust, James Bond style, any second now.”
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'm confused by 'postcapitalism' as a term, probably because I've never considered facts, including recipes, to be capital that someone should own. Can you have a contract with someone that knows lots of facts and can put them to use? Sure. Can you own facts? Not without a government-granted monopoly. And government-granted monopolies are not capitalism as I understand it.
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.
That's a bit of an arbitrary distinction. Without the government monopoly on violence, what's to stop me from knocking your door down and forcing you to perform free labor for me? Do you think ownership is part of the natural universe, something that can be read off of molecules and determined with a microscope?
Every exchange, be it of goods, services or ideas, relies on a regulated marketplace.
We're veering into the we worn paths of rights theory. But I'll point out that theft of precious matter is universally condemned in modern societies. And telling someone else's jokes is rarely criminal.
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.
Not at all. A piece of matter has a unique identity. You can arrange other matter to resemble it, but you can't copy it, strictly speaking.
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.
And this proves your point that information should not be owned how? You're making various factual statements about what is easy, what is hard, what societies tend to condemn and tend not to condemn, but nowhere in there is a line of reasoning that actually supports your original claim.
Theft where someone is deprived of something unique (Grandpa's pocket watch) is fundamentally different than 'theft' where the original thing (a fact) is unharmed. When people 'steal' beer recipes or jokes, they erode exclusivity. They don't deprive someone of particular molecules.
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'.
Like most words, it depends on what your purpose is.
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.
"Vanguard of postcapitalism" because they publish a recipe?
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.
"Vanguard of postcapitalism" because they publish a recipe?
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.)
Do you think that beer recipes are not dependant on the brewing equipment you are using?
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.
Ultimately there's nothing magical about brewing, if you hit the same temperatures, use water with a similar chemical composition and use the same ingredients and yeast you're going to get the same result. Hard to do as a homebrewer, for sure, but not so hard for a professional brewer with a good installation.
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.
I agree the real issue is the push to grow. there is an optimum size for everything and the irrational drive to make everything as big as possible has caused us to loose a lot of great things.
I've noticed the same reduction in quality when a brand scales, but I find it odd to call that a feature of capitalism. Really, it just seems like a feature of commerce, and there's no reason why a non-capitalist system wouldn't also have this feature.
I know this company. Their marketing REEKS of lame desperation. The whole company is basically like that one old Toyota commercial where the guy equated a Corolla with punk music (or whatever generic car it was).
Indeed I'd say this "vanguard of postcapitalism" description, and the "open source" tag, is more a Guardian invented exaggeration. Many craft breweries have homebrew roots and, generally speaking, many of them are pretty accommodating of homebrewer inquiries to various degree.
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.
I've gone to one of my local breweries (in the US) for help with getting their recipe right. I messed something up along the way and brought a sample to the brewmaster, who pinpointed exactly what went wrong. The next batch was dead on.
Did you know that some (and I think all?) of Sierra Nevada's brews are bottle conditioned? Which means that there's a tiny bit of attenuated yeast in the bottom. Create a starter from this, find a clone recipe (they're out there) and you can have a very close match to their product.
I've never heard this "postcapitalism" term before so I dug around a bit.
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.
I found the article mildly interesting (mainly because I like Brewdog, met some of the guys running it at a tasting a few years ago - and I even own a share) -- but it is clearly marketing fluff (or a sub[1]).
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).
> "Vanguard of postcapitalism" because they publish a recipe? I'd say it was a publicity stunt from very effective brand marketer
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 do like Brewdog's "Dead Pony" light IPA. Hoppy with a good bite, and light enough (3.6% abv) for an easy session with some movies. Excellent 3 to 4 % abv ales are a hallmark of English brewing.
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.
An article about postcapitalism that doesn't promote violence-backed top-down compulsory programs like tax-funded basic income? What a breath of fresh air.
When capitalism is discussed, it should be according to the following kind of definition:
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
since the new labels came out, I like the punk and especially the 5am less. I still like the libertine. I was wondering if they were being prepared differently or in a new brewery or something that coincided with the new labels. I'm drinking them far away from the UK, so not sure if there are other issues at work. Cool brewery though. I've loved a couple of their collaborations.
Home brewing is something I'd really like to get into.
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?
It's great, and what makes it so great is exactly that. It's highly possible to brew 5 gallons batches with the very same ingredient quality as any microbrewery and a process which is the same but at a smaller scale.
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.
If you start with pre-assembled kits, they're really quite difficult to screw up, and the results are usually quite drinkable. The pre-assembled kits are usually 5 gallon/19 liters, although 1 gallon kits are available as well, but cost goes up (per yield).
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.
Making beer is pretty easy. I always tell people: if you can boil water, tell time and be clean, you can make beer. The clean part is the most important. Malt is a perfect medium to grow all kinds of critters and until the yeast have established themselves, there is risk of infection (no health risks, but funky flavors).
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"
There's a lot of information on homebrewing, and it can seem really easy to mess up. But despite all of that, even if you make a lot of mistakes, odds are pretty good that you'll make beer, and drinkable beer at that.
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.
91 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] threadAnd 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.
(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.
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...
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.
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://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32747973
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.
Wouldn't that be Mission Impossible style?
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 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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLhfxI8T2cU
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).
[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
[2] http://www.ubuntu-trading.com/our-fairtrade-cola
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.
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!
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 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.