Space Beer May Taste Better Than Earth Beer

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Researchers are investigating how beer making may be affected by microgravity—not (just) for the prospect of one day sipping brews in space, but for ensuring humanity's survival beyond Earth.

To explore how these concepts may change offworld, a team at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) first experimented with making beer in microgravity. Their results, published in the journal Beverages , indicate microgravity may not only speed up fermentation processes—it may also produce higher quality products.

"We are absolutely going to be conducting fermentations under microgravity in the future, as we continue space exploration, and there are going to be outcomes that will be very difficult for us to predict," Andrew MacIntosh, study co-author and UF/IFAS associate professor of food science, said in an accompanying university announcement on August 14.

Getting a beer brewer's starter kit up to the International Space Station, however, isn't quite in the cards yet. Instead, the UF team led by undergraduate researcher Pedro Fernandez Mendoza created a tiny microgravity simulator here on Earth. After gathering locally grown barley and mashing it into wort (grain-derived sugary liquid necessary for beers and whiskey), Mendoza and colleagues portioned it out into six samples. They then added the yeast used in lagers , Saccharomyces pastrorianus , to each tube before leaving three of them to act as controls. The other trio were placed in a clinostat—a tool capable of simulating microgravity conditions by constantly rotating its contents around a horizontal axis. Over the course of three days, the team then assessed their fermenting baby-beers at regular intervals on the basis of density, yeast counts, and yeast viability.

After three days, researchers were able to confirm one of their initial hypotheses that microgravity doesn't appear to harmfully affect fermentation. What's more, the fermentation process actually sped up in the clinostat samples as compared to their controls. But there was one additional, unexpected result—microgravity yeast may allow for even higher quality products than simply fermenting here on Earth. Although further investigation is needed, researchers think this might relate to a particular gene in yeast that oversees the levels of ester—fermentation byproducts responsible for both good and bad beer flavors.