The winery "Asahi Shuzo" located in Iwakuni City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan announced on the 11th that it will challenge the challenge of brewing wine in space, and emphasized that it intends to sell the popular sake "Dassai" under Moon Brewing in the future. According to Kyodo News, Asahi Shuzo envisions that even if humans move to the moon, there will still be a need for drinking, so it is striving to try brewing processes such as sake rice fermentation on the International Space Station (ISS).
Asahi Shuzo said that if the brewing is successful, it will sell a limited bottle at a price of 100 million yen (approximately RM2.87 million), and then donate all the proceeds to Japan's space development program.
According to Asahi Shuzo, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries proposed brewing wine in space in 2022 and plans to target launch in the second half of 2025. Currently, we are actively developing brewing equipment that can be placed in the "Hope" experimental cabin of the ISS module.
Brewing experiments will be conducted using equipment that reproduces the gravity of the moon's surface (approximately 1/6 of Earth's). Asahi Shuzo will monitor the brewing from the surface and hope to complete the brewing process. The plan is to freeze the sake mash and bring it back to Earth, and then put the squeezed sake into 100 ml bottles.
It is worth mentioning that Asahi Shuzo also made a bold statement on the 11th, "In the future, it wants to brew Dassai on the surface of the moon."