We received a note from Neal Stewart of Flying Dog Brewery about their “Open Source Beer Project“. You’re almost certainly familiar with the concept of open source software. (Wordpress, the software that runs Hop Talk, is open source.) But open source beer?

Denver’s Flying Dog Brewery today announced plans to release what is believed to be the first “open source” beer to hit the market in the U.S. “Open source” is a term most commonly used in the software industry and refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. In this case, Flying Dog’s Open Source Beer Project will allow beer drinkers and homebrewers to create and recommend changes and modifications to the recipe.

The Open Source Beer Project will start as a Dopplebock but the style may evolve as participants offer ideas and tweak the recipe. “We are encouraging input on every part of the recipe, down to how what variety of hops we should use, how much we should use and when we should add them,” said Flying Dog Head Brewer, Matt Brophy.

Flying Dog’s Director of Marketing, Neal Stewart says that this is a unique way for consumers to participate in the creation of a new beer. “The Open Source Beer is a truly collaborative project and gives our loyal fans the opportunity to buy a beer that they actually played a major role in creating.”

The open source beer will be Flying Dog’s latest “Wild Dog” release and will hit stores in October. Wild Dogs are extremely limited edition beers that come exclusively in hand corked and labeled 750ml bottles. Only 5000 bottles of the Open Source Wild Dogs will be available to the public. Flying Dog’s current Wild Dog is a whiskey barrel-aged version of their popular Gonzo Imperial Porter.

For more information or to make recipe comments on the Open Source Beer Project, visit www.opensourcebeerproject.com .

The beer blogosphere is fairly abuzz with news of this new endeavor. While the Free Beer Project has been around for a while, it was originally conceived in Denmark. I don’t know of any American brewer that’s ever done such a thing. I’m especially intrigued because Flying Dog bought Wild Goose Brewery—which is just up the road—so I can get the whole “litter” of Flying Dog beers here. I’ll be following this and looking forward to its release.

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