Why brewing beer in space is more important than you think

Last spring, Budweiser declared its intention to be the beer of choice for future Martian colonists seeking a cold one in space. The company is due to take one giant step for beerkind on 12 December, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to take Budweiser’s barley seeds from Cape Canaveral in Florida up to the International Space Station.

The seeds, a small part of a big cargo resupply mission to the ISS, are part of plans by Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser’s parent company) to conduct two new experiments aboard the space station in order to examine how its barley seeds…