Why... did they do this? What is the purpose - wow, this beer was made with a very tiny proportion of it coming from some barley plants that were grown in a five gallon bag on the space station. Woopety. Japanese people get a boner for every stupid gimmick that comes along.

How about this? Instead of "inventing" (what exactly did someone invent? They sure didn't invent FERMENTATION, and that's the only process at hand here) space beer why don't we try to get to the point to where we can actually travel in space? You know, to where it doesn't take the effort of thousands of people to send one man into space. It's like we got to the moon and then said, "oh well, we're done, let's keep a few probes going out to keep up our funding but that's it guys!"

I agree that it seems like a trite experiment, and the amount of barley produced wasn't enough to brew even a quart of beer, but it is interesting, and fun. Learning what kinds of food can be grown in space is crucial to prolonged, manned, space exploration. Right now it just makes more sense and is less costly to send probes to help us explore distant planets. We can utilize technology and remotely explore without jeopardizing human life, until we have developed more practical and safe methods of getting humans to these far away places.

We're not sending probes to "keep up our funding," the fact is that the US government has cut funding to space exploration because the monkeys involved in the current administration don't understand the importance of scientific discovery or deep space exploration.

I'm happy to see that at least we have our priorities straight when it comes to what we'll need to produce on prolonged space flights. Can't have enough beer. Future astronauts will have recreation time and will certainly be able to have some fun when spending months in space. Although, I dunno, are there any known drawbacks to imbibing in 0-G?