While a couple of astronauts said they flew drunk, and NASA says that they haven’t turned up anything about alcohol abuse among astronauts for at least a decade, space wasn’t always “dry”.

Anna Davison examines such examples on NewScientist, including Buzz Aldrin’s communion on the moon and a graduate student’s experiment on fermentation in space.

Beyond the challenge of producing beer in space is the problem of serving it, says Jonathan Clark, a former flight surgeon and now the space medicine liaison for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute in Houston, Texas, US.

Without gravity, bubbles don’t rise, so “obviously the foam isn’t going to come to a head”, Clark told New Scientist.

Apparently the cosmonauts on the Mir space station enjoyed a bit of a drink and were perturbed to learn the International Space Station is dry. Worse, carbonated beverages are basically a bad idea, because there’s no gravity to pull the liquid down and force the carbonation up. Who wants people to have “wet burps” in a small, enclosed space?

Beer in space: A short but frothy history