Hot on the (slightly wobbly) heels of tales of drunken astronauts at the controls of the Space Shuttle comes a delightfully scientific report on the theory and practice of, yes,

Beer! In! SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!

…Graduate student Kirsten Sterrett at the University of Colorado in the US wrote a thesis on fermentation in space, with support from US beer behemoth Coors. She sent a miniature brewing kit into orbit aboard a space shuttle several years ago and produced a few sips of beer. She later sampled the space brew, but because of chemicals in and near it from her analysis, it didn’t taste great by the time she tried it.

Did anyone else note that, had it tasted good, it would have been the first beverage produced by Coors that ever did.

But there are drawbacks. Despite advantages like no lanes in space and not much to run into, turns out there are some compelling reasons not to chug your Spud in orbit.

Unfortunately for thirsty astronauts, beer is poorly suited to space consumption because of the gas it includes. Without gravity to draw liquids to the bottoms of their stomachs, leaving gases at the top, astronauts tend to produce wet burps.

On the upside, although in the oxygen-enriched atmosphere astronauts cannot partake of beer bongs, they can, thanks to advanced and high-priority Dutch research, partake of beer balls.

I once dated a guy who had beer balls, or so he tried to tell me in the backseat of his father’s Caddy.

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