This article is wrong in a variety of ways.
https://www.tor.com/2018/12/18/how-to-make-beer-with-only-what-you-can-grow-on-a-generation-ship/
I've thought about generation ships a bit. I've got spreadsheets. They aren't necessarily good spreadsheets, but I absolutely have them.
I've also made beer. Homebrewing, and in more fancy establishments. I've been to breweries older than the US.
And, well, here's the net: People will make beer. They'll find a way.
This'll happen for a bunch of reasons:
1. It is a fantastic means of preserving calories.
2. It is a fantastic means of cleaning water.
3. It'll get ya drunk.
4. It tastes good.
This article starts by saying to use Brewer's Yeast. There are a variety of yeasts used to make beer, chosen for taste, expected ABV, durability, and a bunch of other reasons. For example, champagne yeast is good to use if your wort has stalled.
The article then claims the production of starches is problematic, and that you'd only use excess to make beer. Reason (1) and (2) are the biggest ones for why humanity has needed beer over the centuries.
Hops and barley are not the only way to get flavor. Having some is a very good idea, but these are not necessary.
Sure, the Bavarian Purity laws call for only four ingredients. Which is really limiting the beers that can be made and called beer in Bavaria. It's really kind of a problem; the US has a lot of cool microbreweries that use ingredients other than those four, and we're making some of the best new beers.
Anyway. I might be the right person to argue with positions like this. I'm not sure.
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I think the true magic of the internet is that when somebody says "I'm going to write an article about beer-brewing on a generation ship", that article can and will reach another person who realizes "Oh! Apparently beer-brewing on generation ships is one of my areas of expertise! And this article doesn't really hit on all cylinders."
ReplyDeleteThe article neglects to hit two of the most important points for beer on a generation ship: genetic manipulation, and the lack of gravity.
ReplyDeleteIf you have the technology to make a generation ship, you almost definitely have the tech to directly manipulate the genes of food crops in fairly dramatic ways. You can almost definitely make any copy you want grow any way you want, including hydroponically. (People tend not to realize that generation ships are quasi-magical hyper-technology, and direct genetic manipulation is a thing we can already do in the real world.)
Gravity is a weird one. I'm not sure you can reasonably brew in zero gravity. The bubbles of CO2 won't rise, so the liquid will become increasingly CO2 dense, and you'll probably poison your yeast. Will that happen before the beer becomes alcoholic enough? I don't know. But it's an actual concern.
You also have to do some serious air moving wherever you brew your beer, because otherwise you get a bubble of high CO2 concentration, and it'll kill whoever walks in. This isn't a thing we worry about in places where natural airflow is a thing, but it's something to worry about for real in a close environment.
Michael Moceri Yes! And the airflow is an issue in some older breweries that don't have HVAC, because they predate modern aircon.
ReplyDeleteA few obvious ideas:
- SPIN, whether by the beer being in centrifuges or, more standard to the science-fiction staple, the generation ship moving.
- THRUST. If our ships are under thrust, then we have gravity. I doubt you need a full 1G to brew beer. I feel like we'll get problems of water displacement causing issues, but I cannot conceptualize that issue. Either way, my guess is you'll have a survival rate for some strands of yeast.
Much like how you maintain sommeliers are a huge conspiracy of people who lie about the taste of wine, I maintain that your point 4 is wrong. Beer tastes horrible.
ReplyDeleteGigantic vats of liquid used as a thermal buffer (i.e. kept at a constant-but-warm temperature) are also sort of a staple of closed-system ecology. Is there a reason that liquid couldn't be beer-in-the-making?
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson Taste is subjective. You are allowed for beer is not be your thing.
ReplyDeleteI have brought many people away from that, by asking about preferences and seeing what beers fit them.
Now those assholes drink IPAs like hipsters. Jerks.
Constant thrust over decades and perhaps centuries sufficient to generate anything remotely like 1G is basically magic. I prefer at least a nod toward real world physics, so I'd go with spin sections.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, spin sections don't need to be solid rings. They can be modules held together with tethers. This isn't perhaps useful for permanent structures (housing, for instance), but it allows you to create ad-hoc rings with gravity, then take them down easily later when you don't need them. Which incidentally allows you to change the lengths of the tethers to create pods with different amounts of gravity.
Also worth noting: the CO2 from your beer can be used to create more biomass, so you might want to attach that section's environmental system to your greenhouse pods. Rather than relying entirely on your scrubbers.
I like how the original person is positing a generation ship, but somehow the idea that you might grow barley or hops on that ship is madness to them. Do they think you can pack generations of food on a ship?
ReplyDeleteEva Schiffer Rice. They suggest rice.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols White rice is nutritionaly pretty terrible. It doesn't seem like a first choice for building an enclosed ecosystem to sustain humans.
ReplyDelete