Brew me up, bro: 11-year-old plans to make BEER IN SPACE An 11-year-old boy is set to become the first person to brew beer in space – even though he's far too young to drink. Michal Bodzianowski, from Colorado, won a national competition which called for proposals on experiments which could be conducted in space. But rather than examining the effect of zero-gravity on gerbils or …
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Great video
This sort of suggests that yes, the beer will be surrounded by the head.
I can't wait for the astronaut to perform the beer experiment -
"Now then children, to prevent the beer from damaging the space station I need to clear it up and the best way of doing that is to consume it."
"Hang on, I've spilt some more. I better clean that up as well"
Also, brewers yeats differ in whether they are 'top' or 'bottom' fermenting - which refers to whether the yeast forms a layer that floats on the liquor, or sinks. This plays an important factor in brewing on Earth, so the brewing process itself in space would be interesting. The fining process also involves sedimentation of the dead yeast, which would not happen in zero gravity, so this may be replaced by flocculation (essentially clumping together), or some form of filtration?
edit - damn, just beat me to it!
re: top v bottom
Indeed, yeasts do that and have been bred (old style genetic modification) to do that. You could solve it by centrifuge too.
What's also interesting is the C02 made during fermentation. Part of the reason beer doesn't spoil while brewing is that it forms a blanket of CO2 over the top, which being slightly more dense than oxygen and nitrogen forces the yeast to anaerobically respire, hence the alcohol. (another aside, you personally make ethanol all the time using the same process). You can help this along a bit with a bubble trap, but I'm unsure how that would work in microgravity.
Also, as it forms in the beer the the CO2 bubbles up to the top, would the bubbles just stay suspended?
What a great idea for a project.
"Also, as it forms in the beer the the CO2 bubbles up to the top, would the bubbles just stay suspended?"
I expect the CO2 would form few bubbles as the motion of the yeast, generating the CO2, and the tiny CO2 bubbles themselves will likely be determined by Brownian motion up to a certain size. At which point other forces like surface tension and the expanding larger bubbles simply engulfing the nearby smaller ones or breaching the outer surface of the liquid and leaving the body. The bubbles leaving the body of liquid should be quite interesting since it would resemble a rocket driven by the ejected mass of the bubble driven by the surface tension of the fluid. A floating ball of fluid wouldn't move because there should be no preference for the direction of the ejecta but when placed in a container it should produce a directional force. This experiment is getting more interesting by the minute. Who knew a simple pint would literally lead to rocket science?
Well yes, and no. The yeast either out-competes bacteria, or the beer spoils, so if you actually end up with beer as the end product, rather than some stinking cloudy concoction (and it is quite easy to tell the difference by appearance and smell alone), you can be pretty certain that the only microorganism in it will be traces of the yeast.
Added to that the fact that the alohol tends to kill other nasties off, such as parasites, then beer is safer than water, whether or not the water used to brew it has previously been sterilised by boiling.
The purpose of the boiling is the mashing process, which requires the malt and hops to be boiled up to extract the flavour, but cooled before the addition of the yeast. AFAIK, most medieval brewing was fermented in open vessels, and the yeast would already have been present in traces in the brewing vessel, or come from spores in the air. Harmful bacteria can quite easily colonise such set-ups, and it is the fermentation process itself that kills them off, or results in spoilage.
Even nowadays it is extremely easy to get a hellish diarrhea-inducing thing when homebrewing if you're not careful. Beer is not boiled, that would kill the malt enzymes, It is heated, but not enough for it to become sterile. Then you have a mix of nutrients in water, which rapidly becomes a mix of toxic bacteria if you're not careful. The yeast out-competes bacteria for the nutrients, which helps, but is far from enough (yeast grows ~10x slower than most bacteria in these conditions). The point of drinking beer (or mead for that matter) is that
-it makes you drunk which is pretty fun
-you take it along so you know where it's from, instead of drinking from a random typhus-infected poodle on the way.
As a keen homebrewer I can shed some light on why beer is safe from nasties:
1) the wort (unfermented sweet malty liguid) is boiled for one hour before being cooled and having yeast added, it is a strong rolling boil and certainly renders the wort completely sterile. Care must be taken to ensure that the cooling equipment and fermenter are clean to minimise the numbers of nasties being re-introduced to the cooled wort before fermentation takes off.
2) large numbers of healthy live yeast cells are added to the cooled wort, they firstly multiply and then secondly (when they run out of oxygen) start producing ethanol before any nasties have had a chance to multiply, the ethanol then helps kill nasties.
3) hops were added during the boil, hops are naturally antibiotic and therefore also help keep the nasties at bay.
How did all this work in medieval times? The boil and the hops (or in even earlier times other herbs&bark) gave the nasties a very hard time indeed, and the "magic" part was that the brewer always stirred the cooled & fermenting wort with the same special wooden stick, not knowing that the stick transferred yeast from one batch to the next thus ensuring that there was yeast present to take over before any nasties could.
liguid = liquid. D'oh.
p.s. the wort is made by soaking ("mashing") cracked malted grain in hot (not boiling) water for an hour, e.g. 63 - 68 degrees, which encourages the grain's enzymes to convert insoluble starch into soluble sugars which then dissolve into the water. The sugary water is drained out, this is the wort which is then boiled as I described above. Perhaps the previous poster was thinking of mashing when he said beer is not boiled.
As a home brewer I started thinking about how difficult this would be to do. Another home brewer in my office and I were discussing this and realized how big a part gravity plays in beer making. Typically trub falls out the bottom which it can't do in this case. Also, it would be unwise to prime (carbonate) this brew for a number of reasons. I'm guessing space beer is going to be served flat and run through a strainer.
With no gravity, the fermenting wort will simply expand as a growing mass of foam. There would be enough sugar in this liquid until the ferment is complete for the wort foam bubbles to get very large and numerous. So unless they only ferment a very tiny brew, the mass of expanding foam will soon fill the entire space station with a sticky, yeasty mess.
The only way around this problem is to simulate gravity by carrying out the brew using a revolving drum. "Up" , where the C02 can escape, will be close to the axle around which the drum rotates. There will need to be a hole near the axis to let the C02 out. Just as with any fermentation vessel, without a hole or preferably an airlock, you would have a bottle bomb.
Bottle conditioning wouldn't work either, unless the conditioning yeast was settled out away from the stopper by spinning the bottle first, and then mostly allowed to eject into another container, to separate it from the conditioning yeast.
I would have thought it would be trivial to vent it into space, since brewing is essentially a contained process. The problem of processing it would only arise if it were mixed in with the space station's atmosphere. One would hope that any onboard experiments that might involve the production of contaminants such as carbon dioxide would be suitably sealed.
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I thought the top vs bottom fermenting stuff was mostly related to so called "top fermenting" varieties fermenting vigorously enough that the Co2 produced stirs the liquid enough to toss the little critters around and form foam at the top..
As for flocculation, perhaps a German HefeWeizen or Belgian Wit will taste better in space, because the yeast will NOT accumulate at the bottom, so you don't have to shake the bottle in order to knock the yeast loose (and lose some carbonation while doing so).
..."He got a book for Christmas that was about weird facts and explains how in the Middle Ages they used to drink beer because it was purer than water."...
Indeed. Score 1 for making sensible deductions about the kind of activities an early colony would have to get up to. I think that it is indeed very likely that a Mars/Moon colony would find ways of making their water more attractive to drink of great benefit.
Perhaps we should think of other medieval village occupations which might be appropriate. I suspect that the colony would have to get up to quite a size before they could start witch-burning...
not trivial at all. Artificial gravity would be required to enable CO2 release, which, were it to the outside, would have to be through a regulator to maintain back-pressure in the vessel. The yeast used will need to operate at space station room temperature, otherwise a heating element of some kind will be needed inside the vessel. The water and wort additives - extra sugar, assuming some kind of pre-packaged wort being used - would have to be introduced to the vessel separately from the yeast solution, or at least stored separately. Some kind of internal agitation, magnetic perhaps, might be required to assist the brownian motions of the brewing wort. When the brew is complete the product would need to be dispensed into the kind of sealed drinks containers already used on the space station, to be drunk through a straw, ( and we all know what happens when you do that - whoopee ! ) The whole process would need to be watertight to avoid any spillage and probably vacuum-proof to be safe in case of de-pressurisation of the brewing compartment. In order to repeat the process, cleaning and sterilising solutions and methodology would be required. None of this is impossible but I'm having difficulty imagining a process that might work in space working on earth. Perhaps I need more imagination but 30 years home brewing prac has me scratching my head on that one.
Good luck, kid. I'll toast you with a ( terrestial ) home-brew if you can make something drinkable !
Sterilization, at least, shouldn't be a problem. A quick wash, then take it outside and "hang it on the line" during an already-scheduled EVA.
A couple of days of high-vac and intense ultraviolet (You DID remember to put it on the sunny side of the station, right?) should kill 'most anything!
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