The Expensive Beer That Has A Unique Connection To Outer Space

How much are you willing to pay for a case of beer? Twenty dollars? Thirty dollars, if it's especially high quality? (We'll try not to go higher than that, just in case we end up tempting fate.) Well, how about $110 to $115 for a six-pack? That's how much people paid for one of Sapporo Breweries' most unique offerings back in 2010. "Over $100 for beer?" we hear you cry. "What, did they grow the barley in space?" Yes, as it turns out: Sapporo's Space Barley beer was made from barley grown on the International Space Station.

Space Barley was the result of an experiment conducted by researchers from Japan's Okayama University and the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2006, barley seeds were sent up to the ISS, where they grew for five months in a test of barley's ability to grow in abnormal environments like, well, space. It seemed to work well enough: the beer was made with fourth-generation space barley, and reportedly had a nicely roasty taste. Is that worth over $100 per case? We can't say for sure, and seeing as Sapporo no longer makes Space Barley, we'll probably never know — but it sure sounds good, doesn't it?

Of course, the barley experiment was about more than just finding a creative way to get loaded in the absence of gravity. If we're serious about space exploration, including speculative plans of colonizing Mars, we're going to have to grow plants in space — astronauts cannot live on fruitcake alone. And if we're going to explore space without being driven to kale-induced madness, we're going to have to figure out how to grow a lot of different kinds of plants while we're up there.

To that end, the International Space Station has several areas devoted to growing plants, especially the edible kind. Leafy greens like lettuce, cabbage, and kale have all been grown on the ISS, and heartier fare has been grown at other points in time. For instance, potatoes were the first vegetable ever grown in space, tested in 1995 by astronauts aboard the space shuttle Columbia. And not too long ago, astronauts on the ISS harvested their very own radishes. Maybe it's not as flashy or eye-catching as barley used to make beer, but it's useful all the same — and tests are being run about the possibility of growing food like steak and potatoes from single cells in zero gravity. You could call it the final culinary frontier.