With an enthusiastic home brewer for a boyfriend, I often find myself in small brew pubs listening to other brewers talk about the science behind their craft. Like any good scientists, these brewers invest large amounts of time thoroughly repeating all their experiments, analysing the results and generally spending too much time at the bar.
But some brewers just aren’t satisfied with the challenge of brewing beer for consumption on earth. An unlikely collaboration between a Sydney microbrewery and a space engineering company has lead to an even more unlikely mission: to design and brew a beer that tastes good in space.
The beer, designed to take advantage of the emerging space tourism market, is named “Vostok”, a tribute to the first human spaceflight in history. “Floating in space thousands of kilometres above the earth, looking down at the view – of course you’d want a beer,” explained Jaron Mitchell, Vostok collaborator and owner of the 4-Pines Brewing Company, on ABC radio earlier this month.
The concept has received its share of media attention, complete with corny headlines like “How does Australian space beer taste? It’s out of this world!" and “Beam me up Shhhcotty”, but Mitchell denies Vostok is a novelty beer.
Australia's contribution to the space race may be the world's first space beer
“This is a craft beer. It is meant first for people who love beer so it must taste superb on Earth. It will support the growing space economy by being equally superb in microgravity,” Mitchell says of the beer on his website.
I’m not usually one to get excited by beer. In fact, I don’t even drink it. But there is actually some pretty amusing science that makes the process of brewing and testing a space beer quite impressive.
The baseline recipe for Vostok is a stout, a full-flavoured style of beer that often has a roasted and malty taste. Choosing a flavourful beer was necessary in order to compensate for people’s reduced sense of taste in space. Microgravity conditions in space cause body fluids to be redistributed away from the extremities, leading to facial swelling and nasal congestion. Just as you might feel when you have a cold or allergies, facial swelling in microgravity impairs astronauts’ sense of smell and taste. Swelling of the tongue during space flight may also desensitise the taste buds and astronauts consistently report a craving for flavourful spicy food while on tours of duty on the International Space Station.
Vostok and other stout-style beers are low in carbonation because bubbles cause problems in space. Carbon dioxide bubbles weigh less than the surrounding liquid and rise to the top of your beer or soft drink due to buoyancy. In space, microgravity means that bubbles of carbon dioxide have no appreciable buoyancy in your drink and stay dispensed throughout the drink, making a foamy mess.
Low carbonation will also help to combat what Mitchell describes as “wet burps", a rather inconvenient and embarrassing part of space travel. On earth, gravity and buoyancy causes gas to rise to the top of the stomach so that burps just release air. In space, gravity is insufficient to separate the gas and liquid in the stomach, resulting in burps that release little suspended balls of reflux floating around the spacecraft.
To observe the effects of carbonation on the body in low gravity conditions, the creators of Vostok have tested their beer in parabolic flight trials. Normally used to train astronauts, parabolic flights subject passengers to conditions ranging from almost twice the gravity experienced on earth (1.8 g) to zero gravity (weightlessness). The test subject, who consumed samples of Vostok both during the weightless portions of the parabolic flight as well as back on solid ground, reported minimal effects of carbonation in zero gravity conditions. Further experiments are being planned to test how microgravity may affect how fast alcohol is absorbed by the body in space.
The creators of Vostok will be racing against the clock to have their space beer fully tested and approved before the first suborbital flights in 2012. If you have a spare $200,000, you may be lucky enough to have a tipple of Vostok while looking back at the world below. Meanwhile, the rest of us landlubbers will have to be content to taste space beer with both feet firmly on the ground.
