A small team of people gathered in the Nevada desert earlier this week to take another step toward answering one of mankind's most pressing questions: What does beer taste like in space?
At least that's one of the most pressing questions that comes up when a bunch of brewers get together with a bunch of amateur rocket builders. To find an answer, Ninkasi Brewing Company of Eugene, Oregon teamed up with the Civilian Space eXploration Team and Team Hybriddyne to launch some live yeast to space, bring it back to Earth, and then brew beer with it.
"For me this is a process of being on that frontier of trying something new for beer with relation to yeast and its viability in space," said Jamie Floyd, co-owner and founding brewer of Ninkasi. "In the long term, we don’t know where this could go a thousand or two thousand years from now for beer and humanity."
The rocket they launched On July 14 performed beautifully, shooting up from the Black Rock Desert, crossing the boundary into space at around 62 miles, and then parachuting back to Earth.
"The yeast went up out of the atmosphere, and it came back down," said Nikos Ridge, co-founder and CEO of Ninkasi. "We actually heard the sonic boom as it re-entered the atmosphere."
Riding high on the successful launch, the crew headed out into the desert to find the rocket and collect the cargo. Ninkasi's lab technician Dana Garves had carefully packed 16 strains of yeast into plastic, airtight tubes along with peptone, dextrose and mineral oil. Nobody knew if the yeast would survive the journey.
"We were mostly concerned about impact," Garves said. "If the parachute didn’t deploy that would have been an issue because we don’t know what kind of impact the container could take."
What they did know is that the yeast wouldn't last long in the desert heat. Garves estimated they had 10 hours tops before the dry-ice cooling system they devised would be spent. The rocket was expected to come back to Earth within around 25 miles of the launch site, but that includes a huge area of empty desert.
As time passed with no sightings of the rocket or the payload, the search intensified and was joined by helicopters and a plane. With the 10-hour mark approaching, hope of rescuing the yeast began to recede.
"It was actually surprisingly emotional," Ridge said. "Our yeast is lost in the desert!"
Eventually the viability clock ran out on the yeast, and they had to head back to Eugene empty handed. But they're not ready to give up yet.
"When we first realized we weren’t getting the yeast back, we felt it was a failure," Garves said. "But the longer we look at it, I just want the payload back now not because we think the yeast are alive but because I want to know what I can do to improve the capsule for next time, if there is a next time."
Ninkasi and CSXT aren't the first to wonder about space beer. In 2001, NASA took the first steps toward the space-beer frontier with a couple of experiments aboard the International Space Station. One, sponsored by Coors, tested the effects of weightlessness on fermentation and found that though the yeast acted a little strangely, it managed to do its job just about as well as on Earth. The other, sponsored by Coca Cola, looked into ways to handle carbonation in space and resulted in a contraption that controlled the pressure on the beverage by putting it in a plastic bag inside of a bottle.
In 2006, Japan's Sapporo Beer sent some barley to live on the International Space Station for five months and then brewed beer with grains descended from the space barley. In 2009, the company sold 250 six-packs for about $110 each (and gave the proceeds to charity). According to Sapporo, the space-barley research was done for “the purpose of achieving self-sufficiency in food in the space environment.”
With a similar goal in mind (well, that and a good grade), a Colorado sixth grader built and sent a sort of mini brewery—a tube with hops, yeast, water and malted barley in it—to the ISS earlier this year.
Other people are taking a more direct route and attempting to send already-brewed beer to space and back. On July 5th, a London pub sent a couple of pints up in a balloon. The beer only made it up 17 miles, but did return to Earth in potentially drinkable form. And in September, a kickstarter-funded mission will attempt to launch a 15-gallon keg of pale ale from Portland's Burnside Brewery on a rocket to a height of more than 4 miles (nowhere near space, but certainly higher than a full keg has been shot before).
But why should the beer have all the fun? Australian brewery 4 Pines has brewed a beer they tested in microgravity and claim will taste just as good in space. Because taste is diminished in space, the beer has stronger flavor. And it's a stout with less carbonation, which will help with the inevitable foaminess problem. The brewery says the idea was to make a beer that actual space tourists can drink in actual space, but you can buy it and drink it here on Earth too.
Not to be left out of the space-beer race, Dogfish Head Brewery in Delaware—which is known for its adventuresome ingredients—managed to get their hands on some lunar meteorites to grind up and add to a brew they called Celest-jewel-ale. The beer was only served at the brewery's Delaware pub in September, but it was probably worth the trip to have your beer was protected by its own little space suit, made from the same material that goes into space suits by the company that outfits astronauts for NASA.
So what does space taste like? We still don't know, but the Ninkasi crew still hopes to help us find out.
A truly successful space beer in their minds would taste no different from beer on Earth. While it is fun to imagine that exposure to radiation in space could result in some mutations in the yeast that would lead to some truly extraterrestrial beer, the challenge that interests Ninkasi is protecting the yeast from the perils of a space mission.
"Our biggest concern with the yeast was radiation. On Earth we’re protected from the sun’s radiation, and up in space you don’t have that atmosphere to protect you," Ninkasi's lab technician Dana Garves said. "So if we’d seen mutations that would have been indicative of radiation, excess radiation."
Yeast can be tricky organisms under normal, controlled circumstances, so managing to get some of them safely to space and back and then be able to use them to brew beer won't be easy. And of course they still need to successfully complete the first part of a mission and retrieve the yeast from the desert before it dies. But if they do get some yeast to space and then safely back to the brewery, they plan to make the best of it.
“I can tell you that if it comes back and it’s mutated, we’re still going to brew a batch of beer with it," Ninkasi's founding brewer Jamie Floyd said. "Rest assured that we will try to make beer with it if it comes back alive in any sort. It’s just... we can’t vouch for how it’s going to taste.”
In the best case scenario, the yeast will be healthy, and they'll brew a strong ale with lots of hops and malt that will age well and will give their customers a little taste of space.
But there's also a bigger picture that drew the brewery to attempt a space mission, one that is rooted in the history of civilization, but also looking ahead to humanity's future.
"It's the idea that potentially if you could preserve and protect yeast as you travelled out beyond the Earth into other areas and keep it in a state that was viable and controllable," Ninkasi co-founder Nikos Ridge said, "you could then use that to do what originally was done throughout human history in terms of creating a potable life-sustaining source of nourishment that allowed you to live in inhospitable conditions, and also brought you joy and happiness.”
