Space Beer May Taste Better Than Earth Beer

hubie writes:

Scientists are exploring how fermentation in microgravity effects various brewing properties:

Virtually every civilization throughout history has relied on fermentation not just for their booze, but for making everything from bread, to pickles, to yogurt. As humanity's technological knowledge expanded, we have adapted those same chemistry principles to pharmaceuticals and biofuels, among many other uses. And while it may not be the first necessity that comes to mind when planning for long-term living in a lunar base, or even on Mars, the process will be crucial to long-term mission success.

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.

[...] 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.

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