It's one small sip for a man, one giant gulp for mankind.
A couple years ago, Eugene Oregon's Ninkasi Brewing set the goal of creating a beer made with ingredients from out of this world. To do it, they had to start their own space program.
They sent carefully packed brewer's yeast a full 72 miles straight up, by hitching a ride aboard the highest and fastest amateur rocket ever launched.
"Problem is we lost the payload," said Marketing Programs Director Kenny Weigandt..
The yeast was finally found in the Nevada desert nearly a month later.
Weigandt said, "We still did a lot of tests on it but the yeast wasn't viable, so we couldn't brew with that batch."
But for this company, failure was not an option. So they found another rocket. And this time, everything went roger-dodger. The yeast made it into space, where it floated weightlessly for a few minutes before returning to earth.
"Came down where we thought it would," said Weigandt. "We were able to pick it up, helicoptered it back to our spot where we could keep it cold. And we got it back to Eugene."
Ninkasi's first batch of beer created from space-visiting brewer's yeast made its debut at the opening night gala for EMP's new exhibit, The Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction.
There's no scientific proof that the yeast's journey makes any difference to the beer at all. But there's no proof that it doesn't.
The Ninkasi Space Program launched three different varieties of yeast, so there could be something else brewing soon.
"If people dig this, we might have more space beer in the future," Weigandt said.
