An 11-year-old boy is set to become the first person to brew beer in space – even though he’s far too young to drink.

Michal Bodzianowski, from Colorado, won a national competition which called for proposals on experiments which could be conducted in space. But rather than examining the effect of zero-gravity on gerbils or making ice lollies using the freezing vacuum of space, he decided that astronauts might like to get a bit tipsy as they circled the Earth.

His proposal claims that the experiment is a trial for a “future civilization, as an emergency backup hydration and medical source”. The spaced-out brewer also suggested that beer was important for “both medical and survival reasons”, although we suspect neither of these capture the real reason astronauts might want to make a homebrew.