Timothy Birdnow

Looks like you could brew beer on Mars!

This Common Organism Could Survive on Mars

If Baker's Yeast can survive there no doubt so too could Brewers.

So what beer do you brew there? A red ale is the obvious choice. A Marsen would be good too.

Don't expect any warm-fermented ales or steam beers. You would have to warm the fermentation tanks up to get to lager temperatures!

One of the things the team of Indian researchers did was see if yeast could survive the tremors caused by large meteor impacts (Mars gets pummeled by meteors; it's at the edge of the asteroid belt and also has almost no air to stop any space rocks) so an IPA would fare well. India Pale Ale was a higher alcohol beer exported by the British for their troops in India. It would sit in the holds of ships, being rocked and buffetted by storms, through the hot tropics. Of course this IPA will be not hot but cold, very, very cold. But at least we now know the yeast will continue to make our beer even if meteors shake the ground.

There used to be a cheap wine called Dago Red; I guess on Mars our beer would be "little green red".

At any rate the survival of the yeast on the surface is less important than actually growing the barley needed to make the malt. Oh, and hops are going to be hard to come by too.

So if you ever crash land on Mars and have a sack of barley and have to store your yeast out of doors, you should still be able to quench your thirst. Of course you'll need to find water somewhere too. And be careful about exposing the mash to the atmosphere because then it will suck the water and the alcohol right out of the bin - or freeze it solid.

It's tough to be a Martian.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:55 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 328 words, total size 2 kb.