Concept: beer that is free as in freedom, not as in gratis
You still have to pay for it because it costs money to make. But it's completely open-source beer so you can recreate it yourself if you don't want to buy it pre-made, or you want to modify the recipe.
I have no idea how to make beer otherwise I'd have a crack at this shitpost myself...
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Beer, is in fact, GNU/Beer, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Beer. Beer is not an alcoholic drink unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU hops, rye, and fermentation process comprising a full libation as defined by POSIX.
Now I'm thinking about a proper "programming language" for cooking recipes.
Just imagine the possibilities: Automated checking for for allergies and such, easy substitution of ingredients as well as portion calculations, being able to fork recipes and change them to your liking, and later diff the recipes.
"...Since sharing is caring, Nerdbrewing brought open source from the software world into the world of brewing and the recipes are free for any homebrewer to try out!"
So I put 100g of barleycorns, 100g of malt extract, 100g of hops and 100ml of water into a pint glass and it's really hard to stir. When does it turn into beer?
Yeah there 100% is and probably always has been.
The yeast strain, the varieties and processing of the barley and hops, the water source, the process etc all make for wildly different products.
So a make that has a distinctive and popular beer will absolutely guard the recipe. This was true at least back through the medieval period, and there are some Belgian beers that still have proprietary recipes that are hundreds of years old
Just a fun fact here. The original name of the band Barenaked Ladies, was Free Beer. They were a pub band back then, and used posters to advertise themselves that read:
Beer is fairly well solved enough by now that, if you have a good nose and a brew calculator site, you can guess your way to 80% accuracy for any given beer at a first try, and by the time I've iterated much further than that, I've arrived at something more interesting anyway.
If you're a company that sells beer, your business model is more based on people's lack of interest in that creative work than it is around protecting any "secret recipe".
Sorry, but you can not have my proprietary beard yeast, so you can't have the same beer I make (I don't make beer. I do make bread, but have never cultured my beard yeast)
A lot of the craft breweries have published their recipes for years. I've done beers from Sierra Nevada, Lagunitas, Tree House and Rogue. There's a few of the recipes in "Homebrewers Recipe Guide" by Higgins, Kilgore & Hertlein, and some that I've just picked up on the brewery websites like the one you link.