A fully accurate representation of the Ellon Brewery
I like making my own beer. You could call it a hobby, but I prefer to think of it as ‘proper science’. It is an ancient and mysterious art, complete with Ye Olde English-isms. My favourite is wort – the liquid extracted from the grains with hot water which is highly sugary, and therefore fermentable. Wort is a very difficult liquid to control when transferring between plastic buckets; it has a habit of escaping from its container and making the floor sticky. Sparging is another good one. This is the process of sprinkling hot water onto the grains during the lauter to rinse the sugars into the wort. I have a spinning sprinkler to do this for me. It inevitably ends up falling off its precarious perch, and into the boiling hot wort.
That said, the fun part of the brewing process comes from playing with hops. You control the taste of the beer primarily with hops.
- “If the hops are boiled for a long period of time, or if the quantity of hops boiled is large, the beer made will be more bitter.”
- “It can be difficult to prepare a beer with a relatively large amount of hop oil extracts and an increased aroma, and that is not very bitter.”
The two quotes are directly taken from GB2531055B, a British patent in the name of BrewDog Plc, allegedly, the #1 Craft Brewer in Europe.
It had not occurred to me when I started my home brewery that there might be a risk of patent infringement. Beermaking is such an old discipline that surely there couldn’t be an invention to be protected. Am I to be that most despicable of creatures – the dirty infringer? Now, before any hotshots at Lawrie IP Limited decide to hunt me down, my crude home set-up does not include integer (iv) of claim 1 as granted:
My cooling apparatus is very much connected between the kitchen tap and the drain waste outlet of my washing machine – no wort passes through my copper pipes. Joke’s on you, James Watt!
Real beer, straight from a bucket.
Still, suddenly finding that your side hustle could lead to legal problems is a definite worry. So, how can you mitigate the risk of infringement?
- UK patent law has a private and non-commercial I would have been fine here, since my actions were performed in the ‘safety’ of my own home, for my own personal consumption. Intellectual Property is, at its core, a commercial tool, and therefore this is a sensible safety valve for private individuals.
- If you are acting commercially – don’t infringe! This is oversimplified, yes, but if you don’t take all of the features of a patent claim, you shouldn’t infringe the patent. In my case, I don’t have the necessary fluid connection to infringe GB2531055.
- That said, craft-based businesses may often find themselves more likely to infringe design right or copyright, where there may be a temptation to draw inspiration from popular products. Original works are always more likely to keep you safe from an infringement risk.
If your hobby ventures into a commercial arena, for instance, if you sell products on Etsy, make sure that you aren’t treading on anyone’s toes in the process!
