If you only have a limited experience with beer, you likely still know that it’s made from simple ingredients that include water, grain (often barley, rice, or corn), hops, and yeast. While all of the ingredients are important, nothing happens without the yeast. If you never added yeast to the sugars in the barley, corn, rice, or whatever grain you’re using, it would never break down and create the alcohol we all want. You’d be left with an alcohol-free mess that sort of resembles beer.
You also might not realize that while all the ingredients are important, where you brew your beer can also impact that overall process and eventual flavor. Brew in higher elevations and you might have to tweak the recipe for the final product to taste the way you want. And while we can imagine brewing a pilsner or IPA on top of a mountain, how about in outer space?
The study on space beer
Well, thanks to a study by the University of Florida, we finally know how beer yeast is affected when brewing in outer space. Published in the journal Beverages, the study was a collaboration between the University of Florida’s Food Science and Human Nutrition Department and the Horticultural Sciences Department.
Who knows, maybe someday, if you live on the moon or at a Mars outpost, you’ll need this valuable information to brew a beer that tastes like the lagers you remember from back home. Either way, it’s also pretty fascinating to learn about the process of brewing beer in space.
You might be wondering why this study took place. It’s not because the folks at Florida have aspirations to brew cosmic beer. The study also centered on fermentation in general about things like yogurt, bread, drinks, and even for use in biofuels and in the pharmaceutical marketplace. The reason beer fermentation was picked was because of its long history and the fact that the science and processes behind it are fairly well-known.
What did they do?
In the study, researchers (led by undergraduate researcher Pedro Fernandez Mendoza) mashed barley that was grown in Live Oak, Florida, and created wort (a necessary step in creating beer on earth as well). The wort was then fermented using a lager yeast called Saccharomyces pastorianus. They divided the wort into six identical samples. Three were fermented using earth conditions and three were fermented using simulated microgravity.
Does it taste different?
Surprisingly, the researchers realized that even when fermented in microgravity, the yeast cell viability didn’t reduce at all. In fact, not only did fermentation proceed as expected, it occurred at an increased speed. There were, however, less esters. This means that regardless of how it’s made, space beer will just taste a little different from your favorite earth-made beer. Remember this before you get on the shuttle bound for Jupiter.
