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Hi everyone--thanks for the compliments on my talk! I enjoyed the experience very much and I learned a ton. I didn't know very much about Mars or the Mars Society, but being there was an eye-opener.
Is there a link for people to see my talk? A few of my friends and colleagues have asked me whether there was a recording. Also, how do I get to Imgur to post my slides?
Thanks to everyone for the support and helpful discussions; I was able to put them to good use as I prepared my presentation.
Hi GW, please say hello after my presentation on Friday. It would be great to meet you!
MarsB4, access to intoxicants seems to be an enduring human debate. I imagine that there will be some sort of constraints on the production, distribution and consumption of alcohol on Mars. A change of planet will lead to a change in human behavior. The constraints on alcohol will likely still be a mix of formal and informal social control. Formal social control is exercised through institutions--cops, courts, etc. Informal social control comes from sources like family, community and churches. When I was teaching, I used to ask two questions to my students to give them an idea of the differences between the two types of power:
1) Imagine you're back to being 8-10 years old. How many of you were afraid of the police? Raise your hand. (Very few if any students raised their hands.)
2) Okay, you're still 8-10 years old. How many of you were afraid of your mom? (Way more hands go in the air).
Heck, I'm still afraid of my mom! LOL.
So, yeah, how we approach alcohol on Mars will be some mix of these types of power.
Mars_B4_Moon, thanks for the interesting links--the microbiology study was especially interesting. Given how climate change has already altered the color and look of beer, tinkering at the micro level may save it: https://www.nbc15.com/2022/09/02/climat … -industry/
As for the GABF, my brewery partner and brewer are there now. We entered a Belgian ale in one of the competitions. Fingers crossed!
Philly isn't too far from where I live. I can see city workers not bothering to consult the property owner and just doing what they want. I hope the brewery can get some sort of financial recovery, but it will likely only be for the value of the hops but not for the lost sales of the seasonal beer. (Although a good legal team might be able to do it, but then the brewery has to lay out the money for lawyers). What a shame.
My Hacienda is interesting "proof of concept" approach. As for a brewery, it reminds me of what American colonial taverns were like. They served as important community meeting locations and often doubled as courthouses and churches until those structures were built. There is a section of my paper that explores how and where beer will be consumed on Mars. Would drinking establishments on Mars serve a similar community purpose? Would people at My Hacienda gravitate (forgive the pun) to the brewery's taproom at the end of the day?
For thanason43206-- What might be more helpful than number of plots would be a ballpark estimation of the number of Mars residents. That would give me an idea of the size of the barrel system required for a brewery.
Wooden bars are nice. My brewery has a wooden bar in our taproom; it does get pretty banged up though. I'm not sure how the conditions on Mars might affect a wooden bar.
By the way, I was notified that my paper abstract for the Convention next month has been accepted! I'm planning to attend in person and I hope I'm able to folks on this forum for good conversation...perhaps over a frosty brew.
For producing beer, barley and wheat are common grains. Brewers have also used rice and corn. In fact, some of the larger corporate brewers use rice and corn as "adjuncts" to barley as a way to speed up the fermentation time. Rice and corn have more sugars that the yeast can consume and produce alcohol. However, with corn in particular, the final beer can be very cloudy. It was discovered that beer drinkers didn't like murky lagers. The industrial breweries then added a chemical to strip out the cloudiness. When beer drinkers became aware of the use of chemicals, they moved away from those beers. Now, these industrial brewers will use high fructose corn syrup instead.
Thanks, everyone. I had a nice little "staycation" near where I currently live. Naturally, I had to visit a few craft breweries to see how they compare.
Okay, CO2 from the fermentation process CAN be reused to carb the beer when it's ready to be served. However, the equipment to do this has been a matter of scale--larger breweries can do it and home kits don't really need to do it. However, craft breweries have not had the financial resources to purchase the required equipment. This may be changing: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ … -1.6091241
Interestingly, here is an earlier article about NASA working on tech to recover CO2 and how the technology could be used for beer on Earth: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2016/cg_3.html. The Mars Society has a nice mention in the piece as well.
I go away for a short vacation and the discussion has taken off! (Forgive the pun). I'll to try to reengage where I can.
CO2 is a byproduct of fermentation and must be released. CO2 is reintroduced from a separate source when fermentation is complete to give the beer some additional carbonation. We call it "carbing" and it's generally the final step before tapping the beer for serving.
Maui Brewing Company captures some of the CO2 from the fermentation process to make dry ice, which it provides to the local community for free.
Mars_B4_Moon, thanks for the interesting article. Understanding the effects of low gravity on yeast is particularly important for the fermentation process. Generally speaking, there are two categories of brewing yeast--ale and lager. Ale yeast is top-fermenting while lager yeast is bottom fermenting and requires colder temperatures. "Lager" comes from the German word "to store," which is what lager brewers would do--they would store their barrels of beer in colder areas over weeks or months to allow for fermentation.
Regardless of the type of yeast, on Mars, to compensate for low gravity, any type of fermentation vessel will have to incorporate a type of vacuum to get the yeast to fall. This will create stress on the yeast and will affect the flavor. The proposed Japanese simulation should provide some interesting data. But I'd be curious about the flavor profile.
That's interesting about beer at the South Pole--beer will find a way.
SpaceNut, kegs are made of aluminum and are cleaned then reused. Our brewery is small, which means we often will either A) wash them by hand or B) ask a larger brewery if we can use its keg washer.
For Mars_B4_Moon--your recommended link reminded me of this piece: https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/blog/20 … s-we-drink As with most trends and technology, we are already building the future here in the present.
Just some additional information on beer measurements to help understand a brewery's production capacity. The standard measurement is a barrel (bbl), which is 31 gallons. For those who are more visual learners, a bbl is the equivalent to two full size kegs that you may have typically seen in college or in some bars. There are 8 pints to a gallon, meaning a standard keg will have around 40 pints. I use "around" because of foam and wastage will reduce the number from 40.
With this in mind, and as a point of comparison, Budweiser produces 53 MILLION barrels every year. My little brewery will be lucky to produce around 8000 barrels this year. Most of our sales are in our taproom. We do not have a canning line and anything we distribute are in kegs in our local area. Our capacity to produce or distribute more is quite limited by our resources and by law (for example, we cannot ship out of state).
For Caliban--it is possible to distill beer and make whiskey. However, a brewery is not the same as a distillery. Unless there is also a distillery on Mars as well, or someone with distillation equipment to match the volume of beer intended to be distilled, there will be wastage. It makes sense to try to recover the molecules and repurpose them, as tahanson43206 suggests. That's beyond my ken as a humble craft brewery owner.
It's my pleasure to be a participant in this very interesting forum.
What to do with "spoiled beer" is a tough issue. There's really not much that you can do with the product if people can't drink it. Sadly, most breweries dump their bad beer right down the drain. I'm not aware of a process that can reclaim the water from spoiled beer, but I'm guessing there must be some way to do it.
Hey, everyone, thanks for the links and for the history of bittering beer. I think all of this shows how beer adapts to challenges over time and reflects local and regional conditions. I wonder if the same will happen for Martian beer. Brewers have had to improvise in rough conditions. Steam beer is an example: https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/styles/132/
Hops are a very close relative to cannabis. Hops are used for the bittering of beer. The wort, or sugar water, from the mash tun and boil kettle is very sweet. It's a bit like the milk that's left in the bowl after eating Grape Nuts cereal. There are a lot of other ingredients, other than hops and cannabis, which can be used to bitter beer. Birch was used in the past, for example. So, I don't think it's a binary choice of cannabis vs. hops.
Mars_b4_Moon raises an interesting point about the power of the big brewing companies. Although Budweiser declared it would be the first brewery on Mars, Belgian AB Imbev owns Budweiser. AB Imbev is a massive global company--it also owns Beck's, Corona, Stella Artois, Modelo, Michelob, among others. It will be able to make the type of capital investment for brewing equipment needed for Mars' unique environment.
Another advantage AB Imbev enjoys is access to ingredients. With the climate crisis upon us, ingredients for beer will become scarcer. Only a large corporation like AB Imbev will likely be able to corner the market. Craft brewers, like me, will not be able to compete.
Sadly, this may lead to beer becoming a premium beverage. Prices for the consumer will soar. The future image of Joe Sixpack will look more like Jeff Bezos than Homer Simpson.
So, for now, please "be vocal and drink local."
Water is used in a number of ways when it comes to brewing beer. What all brewers want is the fermentable sugars that come from grains--yeast consumes the sugars for fermentation. When I give brewery tours, I tell people the easiest way to think of fermentation is that the yeast eats sugars, then burps out CO2 and poops out alcohol.
But back to water usage--there's the malting of the grain, which uses water to germinate the grain (for easier access to the sugars). The grain is then dried or roasted. We then add the malted grain to the mash tun where we use more water to produce wort, or sugary water. We keep adding water until we're unable to produce usable wort. We transfer the wort to a boil kettle and add hops. Sometimes more water is added at this stage too. After that, we'll move the hopped wort to a fermentation tank and add the yeast.
And, while we don't "waste" water by discarding it, brewing takes a lot of water to produce beer. Some breweries have been able to extract more wort with less water, but none has been able to figure out a 1:1 ratio.
I hope that helps.
Marmite and Vegemite would be good for the yeast extract. The spent grain could be used to make some sort of cereal bars. I know some mid-sized breweries make dog treats with spent grain...we could rethink them for human consumption as another type of "Mars bar." LOL.
Beer is also very water intensive--it's roughly four gallons of water for a gallon of beer. I think with more advancements, we'll eventually get it down to 2:1.
Even as an owner of a craft brewery, I have to confess that brewing is a wasteful activity. We consume plenty of water and power. There's also the issue of spent grain. Fortunately, we're able to donate it to a local livestock farmer as feed.
This is great stuff, everyone! Thank you! And, thank you for the kind welcome. I should've mentioned that I co-own a small craft brewery. We have a ten barrel system, which translates into being able to brew about 310 gallons at a time. We have six fermenters. We specialize in American style ales, although we have a Vienna lager we're fermenting right now.
For the scientific feasibility of brewing, the biggest issue will be Mars' low gravity. I've consulted with a brewer who used space yeast and has several science degrees. The yeast stress will be significant, but it might yield a beer that would taste, surprisingly, like a Belgian saison. Who knew?!
The social context for beer or alcohol on Mars is what I'm wrestling with. Australia was initially thought to be a dry colony in which temperance and virtue would take over. That ranks right up there with Napoleon's invasion of Russia as a bad plan. And, yet, Mars is a widely different context.
Thanks again for your willingness to engage with my thoughts.
Hello, everyone,
I'm new to the forum and to the Mars Society in general. I'm working on a writing project about beer on Mars. Here is the gist of it:
Title: "Buzzed Lightyear: Tapping into Beer's Interplanetary Future."
Abstract: For Elton John’s Rocket Man, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” But it might be the kind of place to brew your beer. In 2017 Budweiser pledged to be Mars’ first brewery, and astrobiology students at Villanova University successfully grew hops in simulated Martian soil. The feasibility of brewing beer on Mars is not only about science. Beer’s history, and its current state, on Earth hold lessons for bringing beer to the Red Planet.
As of now, I feel like I have covered some of the technical aspects of brewing Mars. I'm working on a section about the social context of drinking on Mars. Will/should alcohol be permitted on the planet? Where will it be consumed? Will there be "Mars Bars"?
I'm looking forward to the exchange of ideas.
All the best,
Paul
Hello everyone,
I'm finally up and running on the forum. Thanks to everyone who patiently and diligently worked to get me here.
I'm the individual who is working on a writing project about beer on Mars. Technically, "Beer" already exists on Mars--I believe it's a crater named after Willem Beer who mapped the surface of the planet in 1830(?). But real, drinkable might be part of Mar's future.
I'd be happy to fill in more of the gaps with the abstract I submitted for the annual meeting in October, if that would help.
Thank you for including me in the forum. I'm sure I'll learn a ton. I hope my contribution will be beneficial to your community as well.
Warmly,
Paul
ps--yes, I do have lots of beer. I co-own a craft brewery with a ten barrel brewing system (roughly 310 gallons) and we currently have seven beers on tap. :-)
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