Outer space and beer are not so different, Michael Duckworth says, as he sits at one of the long harvest tables in his new East Downtown brewery, True Anomaly. Or at least that’s what he and his three business partners, who met more than a decade ago at the launch of their careers at NASA, have taken to saying.

“I think brewing is really where science meets art, and I think space has a lot of that too,” he says. “I think space in general evokes a lot of the creativity in all of us. Obviously, to get there, there’s a lot of science behind it, but when you’re in the midst of space, people forget that, right? They’re just in awe, because they’re in space.”

Beer’s like that.

“With us being very process-driven, and NASA imparting those skill sets to allow us to better appreciate the final artistic form of what we’re doing in a better way. And I think in a way that allows us to continue to experiment,” he says. “So for us, the big things we like about beer — and the big link to space — is exploration and experimentation.”

Still, it’s not like a group of rocket scientists can become immediate experts in beer. The four men behind True Anomaly began brewing as a side-hustle a dozen years ago. After plenty of practice, like any good gang of garage band heroes, they sought wider horizons as their skills progressed. In 2013, they teamed up with the folks at Buffalo Bayou Brewing Company to produce a collaboration beer, called Whit X-Mas.

For those in town who remember that beer, the name True Anomaly may not ring a bell. But Apogee Brewing might.

Duckworth sighs as he begins to explain why he and his business partners, Tom Ahlstrom, Ben Stahl and David Lantz, decided to change names. It’s a long story, he says, but it boils down to copyright issues, since both a brewery and a winery named Apogee already exist elsewhere in America. And yes, he knows True Anomaly is not what you’d call a “sexy name” for his new brewery. Not compared to Apogee, anyway.

“An apogee is the furthest point in orbit, so it’s the apex, or the zenith,” says Duckworth who, along with head brewer Ahlstrom, has put his NASA career on hold to work full time at the brewery, which opened in February. “It’s much easier. It’s like the top of the mountain, and that was really cool. True anomaly is more confusing.”

Like Apogee, true anomaly is an aerospace term. But try wrapping your mind around this one.

“A true anomaly is a point of an angle. It’s like,” he pauses. “If I was looking at an orbital body, let’s say the moon because it’s bad to stare at the sun. It’s used to understand where that moon will be in a position from a point of time out from now. So because there are different factors, like the gravitational pull, the actual ellipse of the orbit. It’s a calculation where you say, ‘In five minutes, where do I expect this to be from where I’m looking at it now?’ So that degree of angle, that calculation is the true anomaly.”

He takes another pause.

“See,” he says. “Not as sexy.”

But there’s a certain ring to it. And it sounds vaguely scientific, which may be enough to offer up name recognition to Houstonians as True Anomaly sets out to brand itself as the new East Downtown brewery with aerospace flair. The aerospace theme is at times subtle, and at other times as in your face as a Super Blood Wolf Moon, with beers named Dark Matter and Small Giant.

Most of the beers on True Anomaly’s tap list are sours, a departure from Houston’s typical beer scene, in which some craft brewers offer up perhaps a sour or two, but largely stick to beers that require less time to produce.

“From a gap mass perspective, I think everyone feels like Houston has a gap in the sours area,” Duckworth says, as he winds through a 2,500-square-foot backroom at the brewery, set aside to brew nothing but sours. “The difficulty around it, and one of the constraints is that building up that program takes a lot of space and time.”

Sours are a pretty easy concept to understand. They taste just like the name implies, mostly because they use wild yeast, which ferments much longer than your standard craft brew batches.

“The other beers turn around in generally three weeks, from start to finish,” says Duckworth. “This is literally a factor above. It’s three months.”

A lot of local brewers can accommodate that timeline, if they have enough space to keep other quick-turns pumping out elsewhere in their production space. But then there’s the wild yeast component, which makes things a little more complicated.

“If you’re not careful, and you don’t have a controlled area, then you have the possibility for contamination,” Duckworth says. “And if you have contamination of wild yeast over a clean beer, wild yeast will keep propagating, and end up infecting your beer.”

Add that to the fact that sours are divisive — you either love them or you hate them — and it’s clear to see why True Anomaly’s sour focus is well, an anomaly, in Houston’s beer scene.