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Brew day is here, and so is the beer’s name!

Written by Peter Eigenraam on 26th July 2017

• open source beer

Today is a special day. Our custom-made recipe for the first Groninger open source beer is actually being brewed starting today! In our previous post we shared why this project came to be and how we got there. In this post, we’re happy to announce the beer’s name and, more importantly, tell you where to find the recipe on GitHub.

Brewing day

Baxbier invited us to join them this morning to kick-off brewing our beer. Today was all about creating the wort (the base of the mixture for the beer), so we were invited to help the process along. A couple of Spindlers got their hands dirty by doing some heavy lifting.

 

 

Nic, master brewer from Baxbier, told us how this first day in the beer-making process is all about making sure every step of the recipe is being followed and temperatures are being met. Accuracy is very important. We found this out as soon as we arrived because we couldn’t do anything until the water reached 52°C, the starting temperature for this particular brew. Once the initial temperature was met, we got to help dump the oats and malt into the mash tun.

 

The moment we’ve all been waiting for

Now that the brewing is under way, it’s time to announce the winning name. First of all, thank you for voting! Since this is just a side project of ours, we really appreciated that all 93 of you took the time to vote for your favorite name.

We won’t keep you in suspense any longer! Here are the results of the poll:

# 5, with 9.7% of the votes: V0.01
# 4, with 10.8% of the votes: SIP
# 3, with 11.8% of the votes: * (‘42’ in ASCII)
# 2, with 24.7% of the votes: commit

And the winner is… *drumroll*

# 1, with an amazing 43% of the votes: 503!

The name is, of course, a reference to “HTTP Error 503 – Service unavailable”: we are temporarily unavailable, because we’re busy drinking beer ;). A special thanks to our colleague Roelinda, who came up with this name. She will get a special place on the label of the beer!

The recipe

We’re really, really excited about this. The recipe certainly rocks. As mentioned in our previous post, Jeroen Bax took some of our favorite beers and made it into a custom recipe. This is what the ingredients list looks like:

 

 

You may notice we’ve added some nerdy stuff in there. The whole recipe is now available on GitHub, you can use it to start brewing a 503 on your own, or fork it! We’d love to taste it when you’re ready.

And now the magic happens

Brewing beer isn’t something that is done in a day. Over the next few weeks, Baxbier will continue the process, and will let us know when the beer is ready to taste!

 

 

We look forward to getting a 503 soon (that sounds great already). Are you too? Sign up here. We’ll let you know once it’s ready and send you an invitation to the launch of Groningen’s first open source beer.