Beer Yeast Could Create Safe Drinking Water In Space

(Space, the Last Frontier)

“Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Mr. Spock, Star Trek 1991

Brewing beer has been a tradition on Earth for thousands of years, a process rooted in biology, chemistry, and a touch of art. But now scientists are speculating that leftover beer yeast could be used to generate safe drinking water, even in outer space.

According to the Drinks Business  “the suggestion, which began following an initiative where researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech used leftover beer yeast from Atlanta’s Scofflaw Brewing to remove lead from water to make it safe to drink, is now also being heralded as a way to eradicate other contaminants from water, including PFAS, microplastics and even used in space projects.”

As Scofflaw Brewing brewmaster Joe McIntyre told local reporters: “We use that yeast coming out of the tank. It’s probably the most important thing that we put into the beer. We don’t get fermentation without it. We don’t have alcohol without that.”

Research scientists at Georgia Tech had already begun exploring started yeast to remove lead from drinking water after learning about thousands of children having been exposed to high lead levels in Flint, Michigan.

But the research team also suggested that the beer byproduct could be used to clean water in more distant places, places like space.

We wanted something that would be cheap, easy to make, easy to reproduce, and could effectively remove and rapidly remove these toxic trace amounts from drinking water,”  project, researcher Patricia Stathatou explained…

After partnering with researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Georgia Tech scientists “have developed a hydrogel capsule to hold the yeast after it is cleaned, freeze-dried, and ground into a powder, capsules that create the possibility of clean water filtration in faraway places like Mars.

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