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Spindle presents: the first Groninger open source beer

Written by Peter Eigenraam on 21st July 2017

• open source beer

TL;DR: We’re gonna brew an awesome beer, open-source the recipe, and let you decide its name.

We love beer. We love tech. We love Groningen, and we feel the Groninger tech community needs its own beer. So we decided to start brewing our own kick-ass beer that will make all Top Dutchies proud. Tech beer means the recipe is on GitHub for other people to fork and even improve on. We’re excited to say that we have already started brewing the first batch!

But you’re coders, not brewers!

Yes, we are coders, not brewers, but we want the best beer, so we asked for some help to better scale this venture and we found it! Baxbier is going to help us brew a first batch of 2000 liters of “Spindle beer”. We’ll do what we are good at (thinking and drinking) and Baxbier will make our beer dreams come to life.

What’s in a name?

Of course, “Spindle beer” doesn’t sound very catchy. That’s where you come in! Coming up with names is easy. In fact, in only 15 minutes our shack full of nerds produced 91 possible names for our first beer. Choosing a name is harder. We’ve created a shortlist of naming possibilities. Help us decide on a name by voting below.

(if you’re having trouble viewing the vote click here) Voting has ended. We’ll post the results shortly on our blog

So, what’s brewing?

We have already done some ‘research’ on what kind of beers we like. The beer should be easy going, not too heavy on the alcohol, and a pleasure to drink together. With this in mind, we did a taste test and came up with a short list of possibilities to model our beer after.

Beers we liked (in order of how much we liked them):

• Flink from Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Pale ale, 4.6%)
• Mannenliefde from Oedipus (Saison, 6%)
• Kon Minder from Baxbier (Blond, 5.1%)

 

 

Based on these beers, Baxbier came up with some flavor profiles. Our second round of tasting was a blind taste test where Jeroen Bax added some other flavors to the ones we liked.

Blind taste test beers:

• Citra Hopsession Ale from Baxbier (Session IPA, 3.8%)
• Saison Dupont from Brasserie Dupont (Saison, 6.5% )
• Kon Minder from Baxbier (Blond, 5.1%)
• Jopen Hoppenbier from Brouwerij Jopen (Blond, 6.8%)
• Flink from Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Pale ale, 4.6%)
• Mannenliefde from Oedipus (Saison, 6%)

After gathering the results of both tasting sessions, the Saison Dupont and Flink led the pack taste-wise. Baxbier used this information to refine the definite recipe for the beer.

Sounds cool, what’s next?

Just a couple of things:

• Deciding what to name the beer
• Brewing – starts July 26th
• Adding the recipe to GitHub
• Launching Groningen’s first open source beer

We plan to have the beer ready by the end of August. Keep an eye on our blog for more updates!