Thursday 10 January 2013

Mixing Drinks in Space: How to make a B52

I want to go to space.  Seriously!  I want to get off the planet and go to space in zero gravity and punch aliens.  Seriously! 

One of the things that people do not understand about space and zero gravity is that it would be completely different experience from sex, food, music and of course drinking.  So take the entire bar culture and put it onto a space ship.  In normal gravity with normal surface tension you can do a technique called layering.  From the bar course I did you take a more dense fluid and layer it on top of a less dense fluid (this is even better with beer but the only bartenders to do it are in Slovakia).  Layering is what they do to make shots like B52s.  See more in this guys radical blog.

But in space layering does not work.  Why?  Layering does not work because there is no gravity.  No gravity means that the surface tension is larger than the buoyancy effects of a given liquid.  This is why you see droplets of water moving on the International Space Station (ISS).  Don Petit an astronaut on the ISS showed how to put bubbles inside a bubble.  This is done only with water:






Take for a second that you replace water with (Kahlúa), then in the inner bubble you add  Baileys Irish Cream then in the middle of that bubble you add some Cointreau.  It would be colorful and floating.  Instead of drinking it like a shot you could launch it into air and open your mouth an swallow it back.  Mixing drinks in space would be fantastic.  Just no flying the ship drunk....

(I am not sure if the above would work but likely alcohol will float the same as water even though it has a reduced surface tension.)

Astronauts have already made beer in space although without any foam and does not taste very good (probably something like Finnish beer).