- A designer working with NASA and agricultural experts has created a coffee that tastes like it was grown on Mars
- MA student Sarah Ali created the coffee as part of her ‘Brew_Lab’ project
- The project reflects on how climate change can affect the availability and composition of coffee
A designer working with experts at NASA and Britain’s Royal Botanical Society has produced a coffee that tastes like it was grown on Mars a hundred years from now.
The Red Planet-flavoured Mars 2126 coffee – an ‘edible fragrance’ added to a regular cup of joe – is the product of Brew_Lab, a project by industrial designer Sarah Ali. The project centers around a futuristic machine that brews coffee from three different dates in the future, based on climate projections.
Ali, 35, produced Brew_Lab to complete his MA in Material Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and exhibited the project at Milan Design Week in April 2026, as well as CSM’s degree exhibition, which runs until 21 June.
“This is very much a climate futures project,” Ali told TechRadar, “and the way I got to Mars was through the fact that if we keep doing what we’re doing now, our future in 100 years may be that Earth won’t be able to facilitate all the things we need it to do.”
“It’s a little bit speculative,” she continued, “but what I found really cool was that people at NASA were already testing what food and drink would be like on Mars. There’s a lot of investment in that space.”
The Arabica sequels
As well as giving passers-by the chance to sample a cup of Martian mud from 2126, the project also includes an edible fragrance designed to predict the taste of coffee grown in Sierra Leone in 2080. This uses the revived stenophylla species of coffee bean, which is more resilient to climate change than the industry-leading arabica bean.
The third and final flavor, Brazil 2027, is used to emphasize the fragility of the Arabica bean, with crop yields expected to decline by as much as 80% by 2050 (via University of Florida).
To design the aroma profiles for each coffee, Ali used machine learning models fed data from NASA’s Dr. Gioia Massa and Kew Gardens’ Dr. Aaron Davis, a world-leading coffee expert.
“Dr. Davis has studied 127 different coffee species, of which only 7 to 12 are likely to survive into our future,” adds Ali. Brew_Lab uses rare, hardy racemosa beans for its Mars brew, and Ali explained that NASA’s agricultural research allowed her to factor in the effect of gravity on our taste perception in the final product.
“I thought about Mars because it’s a very extreme scenario,” Ali said, “and the extreme scenarios allow us to really understand what’s happening. How do we think about things differently to avoid that future or prepare for it.”
Still, it may take a few more years for the best coffee makers to add a “Mars” setting.
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