Space Beer! The Future is Now!! (Almost)

From BBC News:

Japanese beer brewed from barley which was grown on the international space station orbiting the Earth, has finally been tasted.

The Space Beer will not go on sale, but should help scientists decide which crops astronauts could take with them on prolonged space flights on future missions exploring places like Mars.

Cosmonaut Dr Boris Morukov who spent 11 days in space says potatoes may one day be grown, but not to make space vodka.

Like the IPA, born out of the long journey from England to India, one can only hope that our long trips to Mars will one day produce a new fantastic style of beer: space beer.

Check out a video here. (Silly BBC won't let me embed the video; however, their volume level does go to 11. So, I actually doubt that blogger could handle it anyway.)

Here's a longer, better article about the actual process, in which we finally learn that the barley was grown in space and then brewed by Sapporo on Earth. This is less exciting for two reasons:

1. It's a lot less futuristic than we had previously thought, and
2. Sapporo is not that good.

And the quote that really bothers me is this, "There's really no beer like it because it uses 100 percent barley." Really? Not because it was brewed with barley grown in space!?