Humankind has long stared into the heavens at night, admiring the stars, searching for inspiration, and asking questions about the universe and themselves. Many brewers, it turns out, do the same while looking into a pint of freshly poured beer. Maybe it’s that sense of wonder and “what if” that has also led professional brewers to name their lagers and ales after celestial bodies, or to work with space programs on innovations and recipes.
Perhaps the best commercially known example is Space Dust, the 8.2% ABV India pale ale, brewed by Elysian Brewing Co., which is part of Anheuser-Busch InBev. Available on flights and at concert venues, and on shelves around the country, it is recognizable by its anthropomorphized hop cone in space blowing out speckled hop and star matter.
The beer got its name, according to brewery co-founder Dick Cantwell who is no longer with the company, because the original recipe used Galaxy hops, an Australian variety. Today the hops listed in the recipe are the more grounded Amarillo, Citra, and Chinook.
Hop growers work hard not only to breed varieties that will bring pleasing flavors and aromas to a beer, but that can also be recognizable by customers. There are trademarked names given to hops that run the gamut from the artistic to heroic, traditional to obscure, and quite a few named after things found in or associated with space.
So much like Elysian and Galaxy, there are scores of other breweries that have come up with spaced-themed beer names because of the hops they use. Here are just some of the available hop varieties at a brewer’s disposal: Apollo, Atlas, Comet, Golden Star, Orbit, Orion, Polaris, Southern Star, Sun, Universal, and Zenith.
Last year Ohio’s Great Lakes Brewing Company released Spacewalker, a hazy double IPA brewed with a blend of Apollo, Calypso, Idaho 7, Azacca, Zappa, and Mosaic Cryo hops.
“The Apollo hop inclusion was kismet, as the artwork and recipe were developed simultaneously,” said Marissa DeSantis, the brewery’s brand marketing manager in an email. “We also wanted a brand that fit the cinematic theme of our refreshed Double Feature IPA Series, so building up on Hazecraft’s identity to expand the GLBC “universe” and creating a fresh space character (and beer) felt right to us. Over the years we’ve nodded to Ohio’s history of space exploration/flight, but for this one it was more of an evolution in brewing and packaging design.”
Given the relationship to hops and the overall popularity of the style in the craft beer category a great deal of the space-themed beers are IPAs. This includes the Space Camper series from Boulevard, Sierra Nevada’s Cosmic Little Thing, and Other Half’s DDH LaCEd in Space. Simple internet searches will turn up dozens more. A decade ago Bell’s Brewery released its Planets series, seven beers named after planets in the solar system. The list goes on and on.
Some breweries, however, boldly go beyond just beer names, and seem to add a true sense of space to the glass.
It can be argued that Delaware-based Dogfish Head Craft Ales kicked off the modern space ingredient arms race in 2013. Celest-jewel-ale was a small batch Oktoberfest brewed with a finite amount of finely ground lunar meteorites. At the time, brewers steeped the lunar dust – in a tea bag sized container – into the beer during fermentation, then served it as a pub-only offering in glasses wrapped in koozies made from the same material used by astronauts in space. This makes sense, of course, since the brewery was gifted the lunar dust by ILC Dover, the company that made spacesuits for the Apollo program.
The beer was more Oktoberfest than moon juice, with traditional flavors of toasted doughy caramel malt, some herbal hops, and a crisp finish. The small amount of moon dust is likely for the best, since any quantity of significance would likely cause intestinal irritation.
The beer is unlikely to be repeated. Fewer than 200 lunar meteorites have been found on our planet. The ones brought back from the Apollo program are “national treasures” and are not allowed to be sold or given away.
A few months later Ninkasi Brewing Co. of Oregon went to the desert in Nevada, loaded a vial of yeast into the cone of a rocket, and blasted it into space. The hope was that the yeast would remain viable, maybe take on some new flavor properties and be able to create beer back on earth. The rocket’s trip took just 12 minutes and since yeast is delicate and susceptible to harsh conditions, it needed to be recovered and re-packed on ice within 10 hours of its return to the ground.
Unfortunately, the radio signal from the rocket was lost on reentry and searching a potential field of 100,000 square miles for it was as difficult as you’d imagine. By the time the payload was discovered 27 days later, the yeast had died.
The brewery was not deterred. Several months later they returned to the dessert, shot a new rocket up 77.3 miles and this time when the yeast returned safely, it was used to make Ground Control, an imperial bourbon barrel-aged stout.
More recently, Arizona’s Wren House Brewing has brewed beers in conjunction with various space agencies and scientists working on cosmos-related projects.
“I love space travel and space, space exploration and science and stuff like that,” said head brewer Preston Thoeny on the Brewer to Brewer podcast. So, when NASA was launching missions to Mars with Perseverance and Ingenuity, he released two IPA named after the missions.
“And someone commented on the Instagram post, and was like ‘hey, look, our rovers on a beer can.’ So, I reached out to that person. Are you involved in this? And she was like, oh, yeah, we were out of Arizona State University which is right down the freeway 50 minutes or so. And they have a great space program there and do a lot of rovers and in other science specialties for NASA and other firms. And so I was like, Well, I’d love to meet you. Come down and I’ll give you guys some beers and posters. I got to meet some of the people who worked there, and they were just the nicest people in the world.”
So, the brewery kept the relationship going and created a series of beers with various space related programs and scientists.
“We’re going do it until, until we’re tired of doing it, but the titles are based on heavenly bodies. We’re going do the moon and a couple asteroids and some other planets. And in the collaborative part is we bring out a scientist who has personal experience studying that body, and then gives a presentation while everyone’s drinking the beer at the release.”
With these projects and others by breweries around the country, space is closer than ever simply by grabbing a few of your favorite beers, heading into the night, and tipping them back while staring at the stars.
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