Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/19/what-would-beer-be-like-if-it.html
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tasting of armpit like everything else on this bloody ship
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Duck’s Pond is gonna hafta work out kinks in the supply chain.
#BadAssSpaceDragon
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Aliens brought beer to Earth, so really it’s not from here.
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Brewing beer is the yeast colony. Yeast isn’t produced separately and consumed in brewing beer. Brewing beer creates massive amounts of yeast. Even where breweries buy in their yeast rather than maintaining a colony, that bought yeast is produced by brewing.
Packaged, pure yeast for baking is a result of trying to find out what to do with all that yeast besides pour it down the drain. As is Marmite/Vegemite. A generation ship brewing beer is gonna have an issue getting rid of excess yeast, not producing enough to brew and bake bread continually.
A sour dough starter isn’t going to work because sourdough and beer are different, fostering different strains of yeast and bacteria. The critters in the bread starter will cause spoiled batches.
You can do an equivalent by wild/open fermenting a batch, as is done with many sour beers. But sour beers are more difficult and more prone to failures. In particular bad infections from undesirable yeasts can become so embedded in equipment that you practically need to replace shit to get drinkable beer. Not desirable in space.
He might have wanted to talk to actual brewers.
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But can they get a working Beer Drive going?
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I think this was answered by the film Aniara.
The answer is: Good, then Bad.
As long as it is a not-quite-lite beer speed…
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So… prison hooch. This trip is starting to sound less and less like the brochure.
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Between the people, and the garden, and the lab, the yeast should be fine. Messing with hops and grains genes might be a good way to pass the time, so on my imaginary ship there’ll be an ever-rotating multitude of interesting brews on tap, some familiar and others more fantastical and exotic.
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Yeah, if Mir and the ISS are anything to go by, running out of yeast and other colonies of tiny critters won’t be the problem. Quite the opposite.
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Prison hooch tends to be made from smuggled bread yeast.
Wild and open fermentation produces some really nice sour beers. Though in most cases sour beers are made from carefully selected cultivated strains, and even the “wild fermented” ones are produced from wild collected mixed strains that are carefully cultivated batch to batch for reliability. It’s roughly equivalent to kicking off a sour dough starter.
And that’s why you wouldn’t want to start off your space brewery on that route. Cause sours, especially with wild strains, are really unreliable. Difficult to produce and take much longer. And are thus more expensive.
Basically all you’d need to start off reliably is a single packet of dried commercial yeast to run off a first small batch once you get into space. And then you’ll have more than enough yeast going forward for all your yeast needs. Whether that’s sewage treatment, fuel production, food additives (msg), baking, brewing, fertilizer, animal feed, SCIENCE! etc.
No need to complicate it any further.
Yeast is really useful stuff. And maintaining a brewery in space is a great way to keep it around. With booze being basically a quality of life bonus.
The article is kind of disappointing in that regard. He seems to have reduced a really interesting subject with a lot of implications for space colonization down to “how do we get these 3 ingredients in space, just cause booze”. And hand waved the water problem which is probably the biggest.
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Given the choice, I’d also keep pure cultures in the ship’s antiradiation locker; yeast already mutates if you look at it wrong. And yeah, we definitely produce way more yeast than can be used; it could definitely be part of the food cycle as well.
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Also, there’s no discussion of physical plant; for example, I hope it’s a spin habitat and that the brewery is located in an outlying area; you need gravity to stratify the product enough to harvest the yeast. I suppose you could just filter everything, but that’s an extra step and an extra set of consumables you’d need to worry about.
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Well yeah. Even breweries that maintain their own yeast strains tend to keep up a backup colony. But thing is you need to maintain that and keep it alive. By brewing beer.
And in brewing terms you generally want it to mutate. The point of maintaining your own yeast strain in alcohol production is that generation to generation it adapts better and better to the given beer recipe. Tasting better and becoming more efficient and resilient with each batch.
In terms of yeasts general usefulness, and yeast being the point rather than beer. Running a brewery with a fermentation lab allows you to continually produce different pure yeast strains on demand. To replace backups, or genetically modify or split off for other purposes.
That’s basically what yeast companies do, and it’s fairly integral to running a vertically integrated or large alcohol operation. No reason it needs to be beer either. I mean what the article describes is basically sake, not beer.
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What if YEAST is really the superintelligent species on a multigenerational mission of galactic conquest and we are just the conveyance they engineered to help them get from place to place?
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she.
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When the sentient yeast colony we shipped off to the edge of existence comes back for revenge we’re all screwed.
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Wouldn’t any generation ship want to keep yeast around in order to create polypeptides?
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Well, not exactly. Once you’ve got a strain of beer yeast that does what you want, you want to try to keep it stable so you don’t get off flavors. That’s why you bank pure cultures.
Disclaimer: I’ve been a professional brewer since 1999 and I’m currently head brewster for a brewery near Seattle.
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