Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: BEER... IN... SPACE...

by Hazed

A Japanese brewery plans to brew up some space beer. Sadly, despite my headline, that doesn't mean they are going to be making beer in space - that might be quite a messy process, without gravity to keep all the liquids in their place! But they will be using the offspring of barley which was once stored on the International Space Station.

The brewery, Sapporo Holdings, said it would make beer using the third generation of barley grains that had spent five months on the ISS in 2006. This project is part of efforts to prepare for a future in which humans spend extended periods of time in space, and might fancy a cold beer after a hard day's spacewalk, and is in no way at all a marketing gimmick designed to sell more beer. No, it isn't. Honest.

The company has enough space grain to produce about 100 bottles of beer, and it should be ready by November.

Now, what we want to know is, what happens when you shake up a bottle of beer (or anything fizzy!) and then open it in zero-g!

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