Japanese company to age whisky in space

Alas, according to the press release, the point of the mission is not to provide astronauts with fine whiskey, but to test the way zero-gravity affects the ageing and taste of the liquor.

Unfortunately, there are no plans for Suntory to sell this space aged whisky. They have deiced to launch on August 16 from the Tanegashima Space Center, which is supposed to be destined as Japanese Experiment Module aboard the ISS.

This isn’t the first time a barrel of booze has been sent into the ether: Scottish distillery Ardbeg teamed up with NanoRacks, a Texan space research firm, to send up 20 vials of whiskey microbes – each with slivers of charred oak which with they were distilled – to the global Space Station in 2011. Last year its Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 was named the world’s best by Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2015, but it seems making the best whisky on earth is not enough. Some of the samples will return to earth after one year and others to stay for a few more years. It also employed the help of two research groups from the Institute of Fluid Science at Tohoku University, and the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo.

After one year, the firm’s researchers and experts would asses the changes in taste and texture of their high-end beverage brought by a zero gravity environment, a Sutory spokesperson said.

The news may have made many of you start constructing dreams of getting your hands on those space-aged spirits but Suntory says, they have no plans to make them available for purchase. All the science of whisky magic is set to take place in Japan’s “Kibo” molecule on the space station.

Researchers are hypothesizing that “the formation of high-dimensional molecular structure consisting of water, ethanol, ad other ingredients in alcoholic beverages contributes to the development of mellowness”.