Cheers! There's whisky aboard the International Space Station. Or at least there was, until recently. No, the astronauts didn't get into the sauce, they're up there to do important work. In 2011, space cargo company NanoRacks partnered with Scottish whisky maker Ardbeg to send a sample of malt whisky that had been aged with chips of oak to the ISS. An identical sample of the spirit had been quietly aging on the ground in Islay Scotland until recently.
When the space sample came back to Earth, expert distillers from Ardbeg and scientists from NanoRacks compared the two at the NanoRacks lab in Houston, TX. The experiment was done to see if the gravity, or rather, lack of gravity, in space had any effect on the terpenes in the whisky. Terpenes are present in many alcoholic beverages and are thought to be the base for the flavor of malt whisky. The space whisky had decidedly different flavors which tasters called "rubbery smoke" and "hints of wood and antiseptic lozenges."
Check out the video and see what this could mean for space distilled spirits and other space exposed merchandise.
