MOON BEER

BEER BREWED on the moon? This takes beer geekdom to a whole new level! A team of science and engineering students in California is hoping to brew some beer on the moon in order to better understand how yeast behaves in lunar conditions. The experiment from the University of California San Diego team is competing to be taken into space onboard an Indian craft that will be taking off in December of this year. “Team Original Gravity”, as the six undergraduates have dubbed themselves, has already been selected from an original pool of 3OOO which has been narrowed down to the final 25. The team will pitch their idea in front of an international jury in Bangalore in March. They are currently perfecting the container in which the brewing will occur, which is about the size of a standard 33O milliliter aluminum can. The entire experiment will take place inside the can and will combine the fermentation and carbonation stages of brewing as any release of carbon dioxide could endanger the spacecraft. The team’s mechanical leader, Srivaths Kaylan, explained that the canister’s design is based on modern fermenters. “It contains three compartments, the top will be filled with unfermented beer, and the second will contain the yeast. When the rover lands on the Moon with our experiment, a valve will open between the two compartments, allowing the two to mix,” said Kaylan. The team has said that the experiment is designed to find out how yeast behaves in lunar conditions, which could one day be important for the future understanding and development of pharmaceuticals and foods such as bread in space.