Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Coors looks into Brewing in Space

Coors Brewing Company is a titan in the alcoholic beverage industry and has sponsored some investigations into putting their product in space and actually producing the product in space. Kirsten Sterrett worked at the Coors Brewing Company and had an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering, when she began interest in the performance of yeast in fermentation fare in orbital free fall. If fermentation is more efficient in outer space this would mean a possible decrease in production cost. Increased fermentation efficiency would also make a stronger beer in the in space, compared to the time it would take to make a beer of the same alcohol content on Earth. The ferementation process requires the absence of oxygen, which is one of the features of outer space.
In the experiment Sterett sent a wort, the pre-fermentation mixture of water, barely, hops, and yeast, in a Fluid Processing Apparatus to space. The space-beer had some interesting properties when compared to beer that was brewed on Earth. The space-beer had a lower cell count than the beer brewed on the ground, and also had a lower percentage of live cells. There was also a greater amount of a certain protein produced by yeast in the space beer. Sterett had no explanation for these differences, but in the end there is an increase in efficiency of the fermentation process. The experiment produced only a very small amount of beer, which my raise questions for the production of alcohol on a larger scale.

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