Beer is the oldest human-made alcoholic beverage that we know about. People living in the Yellow River Valley (now in China) were brewing some sort of fermented grain alcohol around 9,000 B.C.E., and the first barley beer was probably made in the Zagros Mountains of Iran around 3,400 B.C.E. We’ve been drinking it, in all its ethanol-and-carbonation-filled glory, for pretty much as long as we’ve been people. Some of our earliest writing is even about beer: the Hymn to Ninkasi, the Mesopotamian goddess of beer, was not only a praise song but also a way of remembering the standard beer recipe. It stands to reason that, if humans manage to get off of earth and head for the vast reaches of the galaxy, we’d want to have some beer to drink along the way.
Which brings us to a conundrum: beer requires many ingredients that really grow best on a nice, healthy, soil-and-oxygen-rich planet. Spacefarers—particularly those on a generation ship or a self-sufficient space station, i.e. people who live in space—are going to have an interesting and difficult time making something that we’d recognize as beer, in the quantities humans tend to like to consume beer in. I recently had the pleasure, if that’s the right word for it, of trying to solve this problem for Lsel Station, a self-sufficient completely non-planetary location in my upcoming novel A Memory Called Empire, which is why I am now duty-bound to bring you the answer to how to make beer with only what you can grow on a generation ship.
Ingredients necessary for beer: water, yeast, and a starch that the yeast can work upon.
Ingredients you want if you’d like your beer to taste vaguely like the beer we know: malted barley, hops.
Let’s start with yeast. The usual yeast is a brewer’s yeast, most often Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which happens—helpfully—to be the same species as the yeast that makes bread rise. Yeasts are little live creatures—single-celled microorganisms that love to eat sugars and transform them into carbon dioxide and alcohol. They need to be kept alive. A generation ship would have had to bring a yeast colony, perhaps in the form of a sourdough starter, and feed it regularly with starches and sugars, in order to be able to have a steady supply of small organisms to brew beer with. As the generation ship matured as an ecosystem of its own, it might develop airborne yeast strains that could be harvested—but it also might not, as the usual air-purifying filters of a spaceship would kill those off. So, to have beer (and bread), the dwellers on our hypothetical ship probably have to keep their yeasts going generation after generation, in some sort of Yeast Vat. Okay. Plausible.
Next: water. If our generation ship isn’t producing adequate water supplies, we have bigger problems than a lack of beer. Let’s assume there’s enough water.
Now the hard part: starches. This is hard because even a large generation ship—let alone a permanently parked mining-and-refinery city-in-space like my Lsel Station—doesn’t have that much square footage to grow anything. There also is, well. A lack of soil. Now, traditionally in science fiction generation ships and space stations solve this problem by growing their crops hydroponically—essentially, in water. (That is, when they don’t solve this problem by having everyone eat Food Cubes, or get perfect steak dinners out of the local replicator.) And it turns out that you can grow barley hydroponically…but only to the point of getting it to the ‘fodder’ stage, where it’s useful for feeding animals, but not so much for harvesting the seeds for malting and brewing. To get the barley that far, you need some soil, at least for any barley variety we currently have. (This is one of the reasons that beer prices will rise as climate change reduces the acreage available for barley to grow here on earth—we haven’t yet been able to optimize it for growth in greenhouse conditions.) So our generation ship won’t be growing barley for beer.
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But!, you say. People brew beer with all sorts of grains! And this is true. Beers are made of sorghum, millet, and agave. Sometimes they are even made of rice. And rice, it turns out, is our solution here: rice is a brilliant hydroponic crop. However, rice grains lack the enzymes that naturally convert starches into sugars for the yeasts to feast upon. Traditionally, this is dealt with by introducing koji, a Japanese strain of Aspergillus mold, which provides the missing enzymes. It is possible that our enterprising generation-ship brewers could have brought along mold colonies—in fact it’s quite likely, as another major generation-ship crop is almost certainly funguses of all kinds. Another option is to add kelp to the rice mash—particularly a variety called ‘sugar kelp’, Saccharina latissima, which has plenty of the enzymes that convert its starches into sugars.
Even better, sugar kelp is a crop that helps keep hydroponic ecosystems healthy—it’s easy to grow, its byproducts stimulate other plant growth, and it even filters the hydroponic tanks.
So now we’ve got rice, kelp, yeast, and mold. How do we make this taste like beer? Hops. And, remarkably enough, hops do grow hydroponically. They’re a specialty crop, certainly, and our generation ship bioengineers are unlikely to devote an enormous amount of resources to growing it when they could be using that space for actual food… but it is possible to have occasional hop crops, as a luxury item.
And thus: space beer. It’ll be cloudy and not that alcoholic (from all the rice), it’ll be a luxury not a staple (because of the hops), and it will taste like the ocean if the ocean were fermented (because of the kelp). But it’s beer.
Probably. It’s beer enough.
Arkady Martine writes speculative fiction when she isn’t writing Byzantine history. She is overly fond of borders, rhetoric, and liminal spaces. Her novel A Memory Called Empire publishes March 26th with Tor Books. Find her on Twitter as @ArkadyMartine.
I think you’ve completely overlooked human ingenuity and the ability to improvise. The beer you’ve described will only be low in alcohol content for about a week. That’s about how long it will take any resident engineers to cobble together a still to use leftover potato peels to make alcohol, which will then be added to the mix.
BTW, I’ve had rice beer. Its nasty. You’d have a straight-up mutiny on your generation ship. Better come up with a better plan tootsweet.
Perhaps moonshine- made with leftover fermenting fruit- would work as well.
This is hard because even a large generation ship—let alone a permanently parked mining-and-refinery city-in-space like my Lsel Station—doesn’t have that much square footage to grow anything. There also is, well. A lack of soil.
Why is there a lack of soil? Soil is finely ground minerals, organic matter and water. You’re on a mining station (presumably asteroid mining); you have access to plenty of grit. Organic matter – mulched food waste and so forth. And there you go.
The lack of square footage might be a problem, though; hydroponic farming produces far more food per hectare than conventional farming, and barley has far fewer calories per acre per year even than conventional rice. So you’d have to be pretty sure that you had the field space to spare, because your beer project is going to give up a lot of potential caloric output.
Perhaps moonshine- made with leftover fermenting fruit- would work as well.
Also known as “wine”.
Where are you getting the fruit from, though? The list of “things that grow well hydroponically” has very little overlap with “things you could make booze out of”; bell peppers, strawberries, lettuce, spinach… they might make beer out of cabbage on the Sto Plains but I wouldn’t want to drink it.
There have been some successes growing dwarf apple trees hydroponically, in which case you could have space cider; even hydroponic grapes could be possible!
I mean, rice, koji, and water combines perfectly well for sake, which is awesome and tastes way better than beer. Your Japanese space colonists are doing great…
Two nitpicks from a home brewer:
1. No brewer actually uses “brewer’s yeast” to make beer. It would probably work, but the resulting flavors would range somewhere between uninteresting to awful; the “brewer’s yeast” used for breads and dietary supplements would probably be just fine for moonshine. Fortunately, many dried yeasts are available to produce excellent ales and lagers, and so can be easily put on board the initial missions to sit in stable storage until needed. Saving some of the yeast at the end of primary fermentation to use as a starter for the next batch is quite common, and perhaps slightly easier for beer than it is for sourdough bread.
2. Climate change (or even just fluky weather) is having far more impact on hops than grains, as the hops with the most suitable flavors for beer only grow well in a few regions. While one needs far less hops (by mass) than grain for any given batch of beer, hops are more finicky to grow so they might prove as equally challenging as barley to farm on limited-resource colony or station.
Assuming water is highly valuable, wouldn’t it make more sense to make hard liquor instead? And you can make palatable hard liquor from any number of different bases.
If history is any indication, humanity won’t go anywhere without figuring out how to make booze as soon as possible. Not necessarily beer, but some type of drink with enough ABV to get you drunk. If beer isn’t feasible, some type of wine or hard liquor will be.
@1 and @8: I affectionately call this “McCaffrey’s Law of Space Colonization” after the passage in Dragonsdawn that spells out that the first two things that human colonists seek out on any given planet after absolute staples of life are something to ferment and get drunk on, and something with caffeine or similar stimulant properties. I suspect this counts as a law of the universe even though we don’t have space colonies yet.
@5: Yep, space sake sounds like a much more palatable thing to make out of rice, water, and aspergillus. Bring distilling equipment and you can have space soju or kome-jochu as well. More shelf-stable and will get you drunker faster.
There is one more ingredient that’s needed to make beer or any other alcoholic beverage: Gravity.
Yeast farts out CO2 in copious quantities and it’s a poison to the little beasties. Unless you have someway of creating gravity, you won’t get anything like booze. The yeast would have died in its own waste products. One solution would be a fermenter centrifuge, a barrel that rotates fast enough to allow the CO2 to rise and leave the wort as it ferments. You don’t have to do 1G, just enough acceleration to give the CO2 a chance to get away from the yeast.
The rule of thumb is that if it has sugars in it, you can ferment it. What it tastes like is another thing altogether. Vacuum stills come to mind, as well as graphene water filters, though that has other problems. (The filter just removes water, not any of the other oils and stuff, making for a very nasty end product.)
As for the necessary enzymes needed to break down the starches into some the yeast can eat, why not tinker with the yeast itself and add in the instructions for making said enzymes? Two birds, one stone.
@10: Merge that last bit of genetic engineering with current research to splice hop flavors into yeast and future generations of spacefarers will thank us!
As Terry Pratchett once wrote:
And women too, I might add. In fact women might find it easier to start an alcohol concern, if the yeast shortage is a thing.
Humanity will always find a way to take alcohol with them, wherever we go, no matter who tries to stop us.
(Incidentally, social programs which deny “luxuries” like alcohol to the poor always fail because all it does is deny safe alcohol made under controlled and sanitary conditions, although perhaps that is the point of those Scrooge like programmes… surplus population, indeed).
Ajay, soil is hard because the “organic matter” is complicated, highly structured stuff. It’s old dead roots and the bacteria that rot those out and turn them into conduits for water and the other bacteria that make biofilms that stretch between the sand and clay grains and hold everything together and about six layers of predators that live off all this. And it’s a low-energy-gradient environment so everything happens s-l-o-w-l-y. That whole “takes a hundred years to make an inch of soil” thing? Not kidding. And if you dig it up, you break the structures– the organisms are still there but it takes time for them to rebuild.
That said, I suspect a long-term habitat needs soil anyway. Composting is the best way we know of to deal with organic wastes, and you’ve got to do something with the compost. Long-term space habitats might well end up looking like a thousand farming villages hanging off a big ol’ fusion power plant.
@13
But lets hope they don’t get sciarid flies in it, because those things are bad enough if you get an infected houseplant. Imagine them all up in everything in a generation ship. Euch, would almost make you want to get spaced just to get away from them. I hope they take slugs and snails though, because what will the frogs and newts eat otherwise? And if someone says we aren’t taking frogs and newts into space, then I’m not going. Taking them off this planet might be the only way to save them from the devastating fungus plague.
@9,
Prior to McCaffrey, I saw it as Piper’s Law; of course, he added tobacco to the mix.
@7
Agreed. Also spirits are generally made with baker’s yeast, or a similar variety of standard commercial yeast. Plus you don’t need to make the beer taste particularly good – since you’re distilling it you are really only interested in the sugar content and what extra minerals and congeners you have.
There are a zillion strains of Saccharomyces cereviseae, and the “bread” strains are not the same as the “beer” (top-fermenting ale – lager uses bottom-fermenting S. uvarum) strains or the “wine” strains. Furthermore, a mixture of two or more S. cereviseae strains or of S. cereviseae strain(s) with “wild” yeast strains from other species may be used for tasty or more efficient ethanol generation. I used to know a (teetotal Muslim) yeast geneticist who worked at Anheuser-Busch.
Anyhow, as all home bakers know, yeast can be lyophilized (freeze-dried) for long shelf life – remember “Fleishman’s yeast” packets. Rehydrate with a little 37 – 38 degree C dilute sugar-flour-water, set it on the pilot light or some other gentle heat, come back in 15 minutes, add bread ingredients, knead, cover and set over the pilot light for an hour – pizza dough. In scientific research, yeast can be lyophilized or (simpler) just suspended in sterile 30% glycerol and frozen at -80 C indefinitely. S. cereviseae (“budding yeast”) and Schizosaccaromyces pombe (“fission yeast”) are classic genetic model organisms, and S. cereviseae is also a useful cloning organism for large-fragment DNA in the 100 to 200 Mb range.
Depending upon how big the ship and it’s plant life is, would bees be plausible as pollinators? Because fermented honey is the drink of the gods…
4: Cairn O’Mohr, the Scottish winery, makes a very nice sparkling wine out of strawberries. I have drunk it and it was delicious.
18: Space mead sounds awesome.
I note with extreme reluctance that given what we can already do with artificial flavours, it is entirely possible that in our space station, they will make ethanol, mix with water, add a flavourless edible dye, and then a carefully measured dose of “Beer Flavour” in the required amount, mix well, chill, sell. You will probably be able to choose between two or three sorts of commercially-prepared beer flavours. The result will be clear and soulless and Ninkasi would Not Approve, but people will buy it because it will be beer.
I think I’d go for the hydroponic strawberry wine. Or sake. Or mead…
@18: While an apiary is certainly a more efficient way to satisfy the residents’ sweet teeth than trying to farm sugarcane or beets, a major downside of mead is that it can take six months just to finish fermenting and then another 6-12 months before it is more drinkable than turpentine. Putting some casks of mead (and maybe some light red wines?) on a ship like the Discovery One or Nostromo as a treat for the crew when they get where they’re going might be a good option; but I expect that on a permanent outpost where residents are expected to wake up daily, they would probably like to reserve their limited farming and storage space for hooch that turns over more quickly.
This article/ thread is awesome. Really looking forward to your book!
Ajay, soil is hard because the “organic matter” is complicated, highly structured stuff. It’s old dead roots and the bacteria that rot those out and turn them into conduits for water and the other bacteria that make biofilms that stretch between the sand and clay grains and hold everything together and about six layers of predators that live off all this. And it’s a low-energy-gradient environment so everything happens s-l-o-w-l-y. That whole “takes a hundred years to make an inch of soil” thing? Not kidding
True. But this is a generation ship, as per the headline. So if there’s one thing they’ve got, it’s time!
If the first generations starve because they don’t have soil to grow food yet having a lot of time doesn’t help.
Hydroponics for food. Soil for luxury crops like barley and hops.
Or else you build the soil before you launch the ship.
And the residents of the ship can’t do anything frivolous like shoving perfectly good biomass out the airlock when somebody dies too. When someone dies they are going to have to go into the recycling tank for materials recovery. I can see that as being a big stumbling block for a lot of people, especially if the media at time of launch is still showing the old “space” burial or death by “spacing” of prisoners, but a generation ship simply would not have that luxury. Everything they use during the course of a trip would have to be loaded at departure, and they could not risk throwing it overboard like that. I suppose if they have some mechanism for capturing any comets or asteroids for organic compounds, that might help, but that is a tricky and risky gameplan in and of itself.
doesn’t have that much square footage to grow anything.
I don’t understand this assumption. You’re in space, in at best, microgravity. Space is BIG. You can encapsulate as much room as you want with very little material. The enclosure only needs to be strong enough to withstand the pressure of the atmosphere within it. That hardest part of it is providing that atmosphere, which is mostly inert gases anyway. You can get oxygen from water, and growing plants will help provide CO2, providing you’ve got carbon sources, which you’d need for the plants, anyway. So, you essentially attach really, really big balloons to the generation ship and grow whatever you want inside them.
@25: “When someone dies they are going to have to go into the recycling tank for materials recovery.”
No. When someone dies, the body is going to have to be roasted and eaten in order to recycle the nutrients at as high a level as possible.
As in that fine book ‘Courtship Rite’ by Donald Kingsbury.
@26 You’re still increasing the mass of the ship. And I think you might run into problems if the ship needs to adjust its direction or orientation.
Nice article, Arkady. Mind if I use it (with credits, of course) for an episode of my podcasT?
@11 – Ian: Wow, that’s really interesting.
What everyone who has commented thus far has forgotten, is that there will definitely not be a one bar atmospheric pressure anywhere in space until long after there is adequate safeguards to keep such horrendously dangerous pressure. The other thing all have forgotten thus far is that alcohol is volatile. Alcohol will also find a way to spontaneously develop. Your space colonists will have to be on the lookout to prevent such development of aerosolized alcohol which will be far more dangerous to the colonists than anything else, including anoxia, for which we already have detectors or sensors.
A story comes to mind about a crew of space explorers, who, rather than come back to Earth because they’ve been in space so long they would face long months in reacclimating their bodies to the surface 1 gee environment, decide to head out to the asteroid belt, if memory serves, and encounter this very problem on the way out and barely avert catastrophe. I forget the title of the piece or its author, but I believe the story was originally published in Analog, back in the mid-1970’s. If anyone remembers the story I’m talking about, please enlighten us all. Thank you.
@@@@@ 27, Thomas Goodey,
Very few humans, thank goodness, are cannibals.
What we’re more likely to use are, first, vacuum to dehydrate the body, then solar mirrors to reduce the remaining solids to ash to be reused in the soil-making process.
Besides, there are so many inherent disease-producing things which can happen when eating your own. Ever hear of mad-cow disease? That’s what can happen. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In space, it will be much easier to produce hard likker than to make beer or ale. More energy efficient, and easier to keep the alcohol which will evaporate out of the air circulation system by reprecipitating it into a form of brandy, though it will easily hit a rate of 90% alcohol, which will have to be watered down to 40% or so in order to be potable. To which you will need to add aromatics to give it good taste. That in itself is a science.
All of those suggesting spacers should make hard liquor have missed the point of this article, which is right there in its title.
Doesn’t an awful lot depend on the details of the generation ship? A colonized Kuiper belt object on an escape trajectory wouldn’t be the fastest generation ship, but could probably provide enough space under lighting to allow for some conventional agriculture if it was desired.
Oh, BTW: I brew mead myself, and I assure you that, with the right recipe, and avoiding stressing the yeast, you can have a perfectly drinkable mead in under three months.
I’d say the same about not taking the means for producing beer and whiskey. In fact, a generation colony spaceship of any kind that can’t is obviously a poorly designed spaceship.
BTW, it’s possible to hydroponically grow wheat. There are some issues mentioned in that paper but nothing that can’t be addressed.
And even if the spaceship only has hydroponics it’s going to need bees. And probably the rest of the ecosystem.
One thing I might add. A lot of beer is made from rice already (at least in the US.) Certainly all gluten free beer and some of that is not too bad. Any US “small beer,” like Bush or Mill High-Life. is mostly rice beer with flavorings. Why d you think they want you to drink it “ice cold?” Because cold tends to deaden flavor and a good beer can be quaffed warm.
And that’s why we don’t want rice beer.
Cue Statler and Waldorf:
“You’re right. They’re all bad”.
@26, the strength of pressure wall needed to enclose a volume isn’t static with respect to volume, it grows with pressure and cross sectional area (i.e. the 2/3 power of volume). So as you enclose more volume, the mass of the pressure envelope enclosing it goes up linearly. Twice the volume means twice the mass.
That’s why I hate to see domes in science fiction holding back one atmosphere of pressure over a whole city, or even around a whole planet, yet being a filmy transparent membrane.
No, gluten-free beers aimed at people who like beer tend to utilize sorghum and/or millet, and several actually use barley that is treated to break down and remove the residual gluten to tolerable levels. The biggest users of rice in beer are probably the mega breweries who use it as a cheap way to fill out the grain bill for the fizzy yellow stuff aimed at people who are not so concerned with things like flavor and mouthfeel. But this economic angle is why the OP is probably correct that rice would be the grain of choice for brewers on a generation ship and the first few harvests of a permanent colony.
It occurs to me that the types of local booze available will tell a lot about a station or colony. Lowest ranked, obviously, will be those forsaken outposts that don’t or can’t keep any adult beverages around. Slightly higher ranking will go to those places that have some imported stuff in the galley, but like airport bars you could appreciate the nod towards civilization while not wanting to spend too much time there. The next rung would be places with some local moonshine, as it indicates not only realism about social needs but also the existence of local surpluses in both resources and leisure time; you could also tell a lot about the local culture by knowing whether the liquor is openly embraced or can only be obtained clandestinely from speakeasies (IN SPAACE!). Slightly higher prestige might be attributed to those outposts with local beer brewing, not so much the result of valuing beer over moonshine but rather that having proper yeast, grain, and hops shows that the people there exercised a bit more forethought; bonus points to those places where a distinct local variety of yeast has evolved, since that indicates both persistence and people who are developing a sense of place. The existence of local mead and light wines would be the marker of the next higher status level, since those products indicate even more local surpluses in agricultural output, storage space, and patience. Finally, the appearance of locally made bold, tannic wines and aged whiskies would mark when a colony has transitioned to become truly self-sustaining and forward-looking.
If you check the ingredients on most of the beers they sell in Asia (especially in China), you’ll see rice as the main grain. Quite often it’s decent, but still, it’s too far away from anything decent brewed in Germany or Belgium. Quite on par with the Italian stuff though.
Funny, BrianGray just wrote a song about brewing beer in a generational space ark! He wrote 4 songs about a bit so nice alien invasion, this seemed to fit your article…
https://spintunes.bandcamp.com/album/spintunes-15-round-4#
I’m not much of a drinker, so not having alcoholic beverages would not be a hardship. Coffee and tea would, however, would be.
@20 That *used* to be true of mead, but modern hobbyist techniques for nutrition, temperature management etc have resulted in recipes that make fantastic mead in about a month or less. Fermentation takes a week or less, and it’s more infection resistant than beer and more quality consistent than wine. Honey is, however, a lot more expensive than grain or grapes, and doesn’t scale up as easily.
But if you’re growing hops and barely and grapes, you’re going to need a pollinator, which might as well be honey bees, because honey is delicious, so you’ll get honey and therefore mead.
If you want easy to make drinkable booze, you’re probably going to get vodka and gin – whisk(e)y requires ageing 3 years in oak barrels, same goes for rum and brandy. So in space you’re probably going to get neutral spirits with flavourings added.
The early US colonists made their beer from pumpkins. It’s my understanding that pumpkins have a taste similar to malt. As an added bonus, you would only use the liquid the pumpkins were boiled in. The flesh itself could be eaten. I have no idea how well they would grow under hydroponic conditions, but certainly here on good old terra firma, they grow quite rapidly.
Adding sugars to the beer, such as honey, would up the alcohol content. Al Capone used such adjuncts as rice and soybeans for his bootleg brew.
You can also use wheat or corn for beer. Wheat can be malted, and corn could be added to the mash to increase alcohol.
Hops can be concentrated into pellet form and vacuum packed. For a typical 5 gallon batch of beer you would need 4 ounces. Storing a few pounds of them should be no problem: it would be less than a suitcase full of them.
Of course, one could also find a way to synthesize the alpha and beta acids that make hops bitter, which would simplify things immensely.
I am sure colonists would try any kind of herbs that were grown on the ship, and come up with some sort of mix that would suffice.
Beer yeast is not the same as bread yeast. Yes, it’s the same species, but saying they’re the same is like saying a poodle is identical to a pit bull. Using baker’s yeast (particularly the dried stuff) would produce a cloudy, rather unpleasant tasting brew. Ale yeast can be dried successfully, but lager yeast can’t.
As for bottling thr stuff, I’m assuming a space ship would have all sort of canisters of O2 or CO2 ready for the swiping. Fill one of them with fermented beer, and rig up a pressure system with some swiped valves and hoses and such. I have heard about dry ice being used to carbonate beer, but I personally can’t vouch for it.
If you’re aiming for the standard 4% alcohol beer, that can be fermented in 2-3 weeks, and force carbonated in a keg system like the above. So the wait wouldn’t be too long.
Remember too that during Prohibition the home brew tasted terrible. It had the right color, it fizzed, and it had alcohol. That was good enough. Space colonists would find just about anything acceptable.
What I recommend you do is go to a local home brew club (every state has several of them), and describe what you want to do. Chances are that they will not only offer suggestions: they will brew a batch for you to try out.
@44
Only for the grapes. Barley and hops are wind pollinated; hop farmers hate when a male hops plant is growing within even a mile of their fields because they are so sensitive to wind pollination and brewing needs unfertilised hops cones. Growing hops in space (or underwater, for the New Atlantis folks) is probably an upside for brewing, because it means that you can preselect only female plants and not have to worry about any male plants in a hedgerow or private garden accidentally pollinating the crop. I’m sure there must be self fertile grape varieties too though, meaning the only pollination aide needed is a few fans.
@46 Huh! I did not know that! I knew bees will pollinate hops given the chance – Rogue brewery did a mead made with honey from their hops fields that I was quite fond of, but I have no idea how that factors into their hop production for their more typical beer brewing.