One of the obnoxious things I've noticed about capitalism, is that its current incarnation seems to incentivize bait and switch. You develop warm fuzzy feelings about a brand, but then they start to outsource production, or sell their brand to a national brewer. This seems to happen a lot to beer, often with a change of taste and a degradation of product quality. With "open source," at least the customer can homebrew their own and do an AB test.
(Same sort of thing happens with startups, I've also noticed.)
I can start a company tomorrow selling farm churned butter from the cows that operate at my farm. It is the best butter because every morning I go to the cows and tell them they are the best cows this side of the Mississippi. I churn the butter by hand and sell out a lot of product. However, when I max out the cows on my location, I need to buy more cows for my farm and increase the amount of land or I can ask Farmer Jed next door to talk to his cows in the morning and tell them that his cows are the best cows this side of the Mississippi. Farmer Jed churns the butter by hand, but he forgets to wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom, something I never did like about him, but he tells this great story about him and the milk maid over in Aberdeen.
Multiply my success more and more and finally I am needing thousands of gallons of milk, a centralized processing system to churn the butter and ensure quality control of my brand and then I have a knock on my door from a white glove butter churner. They have gone through the regulatory process with the FDA, have done butter churning for other companies successfully, and have a great track record. I will hand over that portion to them.
This is why the companies start out warm and fuzzy, but regulatory issues, meeting demand, and other fun things cause a drive to outsourced production.
I don't think it is easy for everyone to take the recipe and replicate it.
I also don't think you can easily use the recipe with homebrewing equipment and obtaing the same output, maybe it could be done with professional scale equipment but I am not sure.
To me is a nice marketing stunt aimed at the homebrew community.
Also note that they're open-sourcing the recipes, they're not allowing anyone to reuse the names of their beers.
Brewdog's the first one I've seen that's opened up all of this at once, but it is not uncommon (at least in the US) for an American craft brewery to, say, publish a "clone recipe" of one or many of their beers in a homebrew magazine.
It seems that the author, Paul Mason, has recently published a book: Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future. Here's a blurb from a review on Goodreads [1]:
Probably the most critical observation to this theory is that information now forms a huge and growing proportion of the goods and services that make up GDP. Yet it is cannot be priced using standard economic theory, which states that a market is in equilibrium when marginal cost equals marginal benefit. Information has zero marginal cost, as it can be copied infinitely, the only cost involved being the electricity this requires. Moreover, the category of information keeps expanding, to include music, books, films, TV shows, patterns and designs to make or do just about any other thing. Whilst there is obviously a cost to producing this information, that is generally also falling. Only legal structures prevent everyone with an internet connection being able to listen to practically every song, watch practically every film, and read practically every book ever created. Realistically, everyone willing to pirate already does. Business models based on defending copyright are fighting a losing battle, as internet connections get faster, storage cheaper, and files quality better. I have long blamed my comfort with media piracy on A-level economics, which helpfully taught me that a good with zero marginal cost should also be priced at zero. Mason notes that the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ (a concept I am admittedly somewhat dubious of) will expand both the volume and proportion of information in our goods and services. At the moment, the information that we passively create by browsing the web (which certainly feels like a passive activity much of the time) is controlled by state and private monopolies; google and the NSA, broadly. The argument here is all such information should be made more public, in order that it can be used to drive innovation.
Apparently the open sourcing of brewery recipes plays into his thesis and gives him another chance to push a short piece on postcapitalism and the opening up of all data/information as an equal means of production for everyone in the world.
What is not mentioned is the human/physical capital required to produce and distribute something of value with this free information, which will still be just as expensive (if not more expensive) in the future.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24878857-postcapitalism
Your mention of coca-cola reminded me of Ubuntu Cola[2]. I was wondering if they were defunct or not -- the student cantina used to carry them a few years ago -- but I think they stopped after the most recent reorganization. It's a shame, it's a great cola (tastes great) -- and is also a little less bad for the environment (would probably be better if the Cantina made their own Ubuntu Cola... would avoid shipping the heaviest/most abundant part, the water).
Brewdog do have effective brand marketing, so take it with a large pinch of salt; ... but it is not "a recipe", it is in fact 215 recipes; the crown jewels, the other hits and all the other misses as well.
I'd say it was a publicity stunt from very effective brand marketers; they might as well have treated "No Logo" as an instruction manual. The Brewdog logo on the bottle matters more than the recipes to its target market, and the counterculture stance is all part of that. Brewdog's advantage over other craft brewers is branding rather than brewing.
And yes, it's also good for publicity when trying to crowdfund from "the misfits, the independents, the libertines”, perhaps because "the financial institutions of the City [which] gave rise to the bastardisation and commoditisation of beer" weren't too keen on their 115x revenue valuation. Nice of the Guardian to take those claims at face value (linked article) too.
But seriously, I'm struggling to think of anyone in the beer industry that tries to "make money out of keeping beer recipes secret", especially with most of the best-selling beers relying rather less on taste than Brewdog. Coca-cola, of course, famously emphasises their closely guarded recipe, but as with Brewdog's "open source", that's more about the corporate mythology behind the brand than any serious fear that someone might even slightly dent their brand and distribution network by making something that tastes the same rather than merely similar.