Open source beer

Once upon a vrijmibo, we had the best idea ever. Let’s brew our own beer! A tasty beer for Groningen’s amazing community of tech companies, researchers, startups, scale-ups, meetups, and other tech initiatives. On Monday this idea still sounded good, so we decided to start brewing our own open source beer that makes all Top Dutchies proud to be a Grunniger.

Coders, not brewers

At Spindle, we love our open source side-projects. One problem: we know everything about coding, not about brewing. This problem was solved quickly when Baxbier offered to help out. After a tasting session involving different beer types and flavors, they knew enough to bring all our beer dreams to life.

The result is a full-bodied 4.2% beer with a fresh, hoppy, citrusy aroma and a herbal, bitter taste. On the 1st of September we officially launched the first open source beer of Groningen at Baxbier.

The name contest

With Baxbier taking care of the brewing, we could focus on another important part: the name of the first Spindle beer. After an extensive naming competition with a whopping 91 possible names, the winner of the first beer name was ‘503’. It is a reference to “HTTP Error 503 – Service Unavailable”: we are temporarily unavailable, because we’re busy drinking beer. Please try again later 😉

Of course, tech beer means the recipe is open source. It’s available on GitHub for other people to fork and even improve on. As you may notice, we’ve added some nerdy parts in the recipe. Start brewing a 503 on your own, we’d love to taste it when you’re ready!