The World’s Best Whisky Goes To Outer Space

Suntory, the Japanese distillery famed for its’ Yamazaki Single Malt Whisky, shall be sending some samples of its infamous concoction into outer space. The samples will range from a freshly distilled whisky to a 21-year-old single malt, and will remain in space for one to two years, before being brought back down to Earth for testing.

Once the samples have returned to Earth, they will be studied in labs and tested by whiskey blenders to compare their taste to beverages aged on the ground.

This is not the first alcohol beverage company to send their product to space.

This alcoholic experiment will take place in the ISS’ Japanese experiment module with the samples will rocketing off to the orbiting laboratory on August 16.

This month, Suntory will be loading up the Kounotori 5 transfer vehicle – due to launch from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Tanegashima Space Center on August 16 – with five kinds of whisky (along with 40% ethanol) to mature for a few years on the worldwide Space Station.

“With some things like beer’s exclusion, alcohol consumption are well known when aged to get a very long time to build up a relaxed flavor”.

The whiskey samples will be left on the global Space Station for an unspecified number of years before being brought home to be inspected.

With this in mind, the company aims for the research “to verify the effect of the convection-free state created by a microgravity environment to the mellowing of alcoholic beverage” through space maturation experiments.