Austin brewer plans world's first beer made with space-flown yeast

An Austin brewer plans to be the first to sell "space beer" made with yeast that orbited Earth aboard SpaceX's newest capsule.

Starbase Brewing - which is unrelated to Elon Musk's space company or the South Texas city of Starbase - sent its MicroBrew-2 experiment to space aboard a SpaceX Starfall disc launched by a Falcon 9 rocket that took off from Florida.

Starfalls are 10-foot-wide, 2½-foot-thick discs resembling giant hockey pucks that SpaceX is developing for in-space manufacturing and cargo delivery. The first prototype, carrying Starbase's yeast experiment, survived reentry and was recovered about 800 miles off the coast of California.

"The next step for us is this fall/winter, we're hopefully going to be releasing the world's first beer brewed with actual ... space-flown yeasts," said Nate Argroves, founder and CEO of the fast-growing company that hopes to be the first beer maker on Mars. 

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Argroves has been working to make beer from space-flown ingredients and said his company's "goal is to own that space."

From NASA research to commercial brewing

Last year, Starbase became the first to ferment beer in space with its MicroBrew-1 experiment, which went to the International Space Station. But since it was part of a NASA mission, Starbase could use the project only for research, not commercial purposes. 

"NASA's weird about commercialization, especially around alcohol," he said. 

Such issues aren't as much of a concern for commercial space firms, so Argroves approached SpaceX about finding another ride to space. 

Starfall mission

"We didn't reach out about Starfall. We reached out just to see if they had opportunities to fly in general … and so we just kind of went back and forth a bit and they came back with some options," he said. "Basically, the Starfall opportunity just kind of came out of that … the timing just aligned, the stars aligned."

In May, SpaceX got Federal Aviation Administration permission for its Starfall discs to reenter the atmosphere. 

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The commercial space firm thought Starbase's yeast experiment, known as the Brewery Archive Space Exposure Demonstrator, might make sense as one of Starfall's first payloads, Argroves said. 

The experiment carried dozens of strains of brewing, distilling and wine yeasts from around the world, as well as seeds from native Texas plants including bluebonnets.

"So, we're basically just studying how did the space environment affect (the yeast) from environmental factors to temperature swings," he said. "And then the big thing was (to do it) in a commercialized way, in a way where we can take this product and now commercialize it, and I think that's what Starfall enables."

MicroBrew-1 and OASIS

As it works with the yeasts from the latest mission, results are coming in from the experiments Starbase sent to space last year.

One early finding from MicroBrew-1: Beer fermented in space appears to produce more alcohol than the control sample on the ground. 

"It appears from all of the electron microscopy and everything that's been done that the space-flown sample produced like 10% to 15% more ethanol, meaning it's more alcoholic," he said. "More alcohol was produced in fermentation in space as opposed to the ground control sample."

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Argroves said it's not yet clear why that happened, but the full findings will be published in a scholarly journal in the next few months.

Starbase is working with Jaguar Space, the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the Technical University of Munich on the experiment. 

Starbase's other experiment that flew last year, known as "Optimizing Agriculture in Simulated Interplanetary Soils," or OASIS, germinated barley seeds in a beer-making byproduct known as brewer's spent grain. The experiment is a collaboration between Starbase, Jaguar Space and Texas A&M AgriLife. 

Analysis shows microgravity affected how the plants take up minerals and nutrients, Argroves said.  

"Some minerals get taken up way more, and some minerals get taken up way less, so it's sort of like a fundamental difference in growing plants in microgravity versus on Earth," he said. "And in theory, those changes would relate to some extent to the moon and Mars."

Starbase's brews are distributed across Texas and on Florida's Space Coast, home to the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. 

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