Beer in Space?

How Do You Make Beer in Space?

Strap on your beer goggles and join us on a hops-fueled rocket ride

(David Arky)

There is no pie in the sky.

There’s no beer, either.

In 2007, following confirmation that two of its astronauts had flown three sheets to the ozone, NASA formally banned crews from imbibing in orbit. These days any rocketeer wishing to get staggeringly pie-eyed and maybe moon the Moon will have to hitch a ride with another space agency altogether.

It’s equally sobering to note that carbonated beverages are outlawed on the International Space Station. Gas bubbles in a carbonated drink don’t act the same as on gravity-rich Earth. Instead of floating to the top, the bubbles lie there, evenly distributed in the liquid. Maybe that’s just as well. The drink would be a frothy mess. To rework the lyrics of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” the head on a brewski poured from a tin can far above the world would float in a most peculiar way. How peculiar? Tristan Stephenson, author of The Curious Bartender, has speculated that the bubbles in this slop would “flocculate together into frogspawn-style clumps.”

Frogspawn would make a great craft beer name, if it isn’t one already. And though weightlessness might make falling off one’s bar stool safer, as the British magazine New Scientist once delightfully explained, “without gravity to draw liquids to the bottoms of their stomachs, leaving gases at the top, astronauts tend to produce wet burps.” It ain’t easy to belch in outer space.

All this hasn’t stopped the typographical Frankenstein known as Anheuser-Busch InBev from devising plans to boldly brew where no man has brewed before. Last December, as part of the macrobrewery’s microgravity research, the makers of Budweiser had Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket transport 20 barley seeds to the ISS. Mindful of NASA’s long-term goal to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, space station scientists conducted two 30-day experiments, one on seed exposure and the other on barley germination. In a statement, Bud announced that its long-term goal is to become the first beer of the red planet.

It’s a well-known fact that water, a basic component of beer, is in short supply outside of Earth. But satellite imaging has confirmed that vast glaciers of ice exist below Mars’ rocky surface. “Several universities are working on mining and mining technology for Mars, including mining water,” says Gary Hanning, who heads Budweiser’s innovation and barley research team in Fort Collins, Colorado. “The miners will have to bring out the ice, thaw it, clarify it, purify it and all those other good things. But it’s still going to be an extraordinarily limited raw material.” Houston, we have a drinking problem.

We all know that Budweiser travels well, but...49 million miles! According to NASA, shipping costs to space can run about $10,000 a pound. “The cost per gallon of beer is going to be outrageous,” Hanning concedes. “We’re going to want to produce our own food and crops and products there, and not haul them back and forth all the time.” It’s been argued that you can’t really enjoy a cold one when the temperature outside is minus 195 degrees, and that beer crops won’t grow in a place inhabited only by sand and iron dust. “Argued by whom?” asks Steve Rushin, author of the witty, beer-centric novel The Pint Man. “Those are the kind of arguments you have on Earth, in a bar, after one too many.”

In the blue planet’s taprooms, Budweiser’s extraterrestrial dilly-dillying has raised a star-fleet of existential questions. If Matt Damon could live off potatoes grown in his own poop in The Martian, could Mars colonists live off Bud? Would self-driven Mars rovers eliminate the need for designated drivers? Will robot beers be made by robots, or consumed by them? And, at a time when the names of small-batch brands are becoming increasingly otherworldly (Space Cake, Black Hole Sun, Totally Wicked Nebula, Klingon Ale), what are beers’ final frontiers?

A cynic might say the reason Budweiser is trying to stake out territory on the fourth rock from the Sun is that its turf on the third is slowly shrinking. Last year, for the first time in decades, Bud was not among the top three best-selling beers in America. Sales have slumped for all industrial-scale brews, due in no small part to the rapid fermentation of craft beers.

Beer geekerati have long disparaged the conglomerate’s brews as watery and flavor-challenged while championing traditional, local tipples. The intense infusions (blood orange, ghost peppers), esoteric additives (stag semen, crushed lunar meteorites) and sometimes preposterous ingredients (yeast grown in a brewmaster’s beard, coffee beans predigested by elephants) supposedly lead to more complex flavors than the beer majors can provide. Even Elvis—and perhaps only Elvis—might have been tempted by Voodoo Doughnut Chocolate, Peanut Butter & Banana Ale.

Steve Rushin predicts beer is fated to become even more locavore-ish (locavore-acious?) than it is now. “In the future you’ll choose from beers brewed in your own neighborhood, possibly your own street, maybe your own house,” he says. “You may already be living in this future.”

For its part, Budweiser seems to be living in the future of Total Recall, a 1990 sci-fi thriller that envisioned what bar service on Mars will look like in 2084 (neon Coors Light and Miller Lite signs, and not a craft beer in sight). Asked if he’s distressed that the first beer poured on Mars may be a pedestrian Bud, James Watt, co-founder of the Scottish “punk” beer company BrewDog, growls: “It’s not so bad if it means it leaves this planet.” Despite the King of Beers’ plans for interplanetary conquest, Watt doubts it will one day become the King of Galactic Beers. “You can’t make much beer with 20 seeds of barley,” he says. “Call me when Bud is growing hops on Mars.”

By Franz Lidz,

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE APRIL 2018
Original Article