So far I’ve done two public tastings of Modern Times prototype beers. Both have been exceedingly helpful because they’ve shined the unforgiving glare of public opinion on an otherwise insular process.

When a stranger takes their first sip of a beer at a tasting, they can’t hide their reaction behind a computer screen. That is what has made the tastings so useful, if a bit anxiety inducing. Even though the whole purpose of the tastings is to receive constructive criticism, I can’t help but want people to like the beer. I like the beer, so I want them to like it too.

In my last post, I mentioned that we’re going to be completely open with our recipes. To that end, I provided links to all of the posts on Mike’s blog detailing what we’ve done so far, and I also mentioned that we’re going to put a bounty on crowdsourced improvements to our recipes. This is what I call “open source brewing”, and I’m going to flesh it out a bit right here and now.

Here’s the Wikipedia (itself something of an open source project) definition of ‘open source’: “In production and development, open source is a philosophy, or pragmatic methodology, that promotes free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details.”