The guys at 4 Pines Brewing sat down one day and said “Australia hasn’t done much to maintain its image of an entire nation that needs ADD drugs lately, how can we change that?” “I know, let’s brew beer for space!”
Hence, the Vostok Stout. They chose a stout to counteract the loss of taste you experience in space: your tongue and face swell a bit, like you have a bad cold, so a beer needs a strong flavor to register.
Then they took a bunch of it up in zero-gravity and paid an astronaut to drink it. Seriously. Annoyingly, the video of this is all from major news organizations who seem unable to grasp what the “embed” function is for, but you can find video of grown men chugging beer in zero gravity right here.
Perhaps less than surprisingly, they’re not the first to tackle this problem: NASA has a very detailed discussion of how to brew and drink beer in space online. It’s actually pretty interesting: beer brewed in space can tell us a lot about pharmaceuticals, and the physics are pretty neat too.
Space beer will supposedly only be available on commercial space flights…we expect six-packs will start showing up on the market fairly soon.
[ via the space drunks at Blastr ]