One Of The Most Expensive Beers In The World Sourced Ingredients From Space

There was a time not so long ago when beers were relatively simple creations, tailored to well-defined styles. The giants of the industry focused largely on producing beers that ranked highly in what we call "drinkability" — though that word wasn't even coined until beer marketers thought it up in the 1960s. As craft beer has exploded, the world of beer has changed, and interesting techniques and novel ingredients often draw the most intrigue. A pint of stout made with mussels or a golden ale with garlic certainly catches the eye, but, frankly, it's nothing compared to a brew made with actual extraterrestrial ingredients — like Sapporo's 2008 creation.

Outside of science fiction stories, there isn't much drinking beyond the bounds of Earth's atmosphere — there's no beer on the space station — but the agricultural experiments up there have included some of the ingredients required for brewing. The trials began in 2003 with soybeans, which then progressed to crops like peas, wheat, and lettuce, and finally on to barley — one of the four central ingredients in beer production along with hops, yeast, and water. The barley was cultivated in the Russian research modules of the International Space Station over five months before being returned to Earth.

Unfortunately, as fun as it would be if this beer had been brewed entirely with space-grown grain, that was not the case. The first batch of Sapporo's Space Barley beer was only 100 liters, but even a brew of that size requires much more grain than can be cultivated in these space station research facilities. That kind of cosmic farming operation still only exists in the stories.

The quantity of barley used in brewing varies quite a bit by the style of beer, but a standard lager might take about two pounds of barley per gallon. 100 liters is about 26.4 gallons, so that'd call for a little under 53 pounds of grain. Some quick back-of-the-napkin math says that growing 53 pounds of barley would require about 850 square feet of arable land down planetside. The conditions up there would be different, of course, and the ISS does comprise 5,600 square feet, but there are much better things to do with it than turn 15% over to farming grain, even if the capacity to do so existed. No, Sapporo's Space Barley beer was not brewed with actual barley grown in space, but rather with grain cultivated on earth from descendants of those space-faring plants.

Does the fact that this beer was actually both grown and brewed in very terrestrial environments make the 10,000 Yen price tag — about $115 at the time — of these extremely limited edition six-packs seem like too much? Not at all. Only 250 six-packs were sold, with most of the beer apparently going to "experiments," making this quite a rare beer indeed. Plus, Sapporo's goal with this brew was to foster interest in space and science, something we can all get behind.

Someday, the food astronauts eat might be grown in orbit or in the soil of alien worlds. Someday, the cosmic travelers may brew true space beers with barley and hops grown in hydroponic farms. But we aren't quite there yet. For now, the descendants of extraterrestrial barley will have to do — or you can pick up a bottle of Pegasus Distillerie's meteorite vodka to scratch that interplanetary itch.