SPACE WHISKY: Astro malt pongs of 'rubber and smoked fish' A Scotch whisky that spent almost three years maturing on the International Space Station (ISS) boasts an "intense aroma" with hints of "antiseptic smoke, rubber and smoked fish". That's the verdict of Dr Bill Lumsden, director of distilling and whisky creation at Ardbeg Distillery, which sent vials of its pre-maturation …
Which presumably are a tad on the large side to ship up to the ISS and then have laying around there for a few years.
Hence adding the shavings to the liquid is the next best thing to having it in contact with the inside of a barrel. Thus also leading to the use of the word "simulated" in the quotes one would presume.
Yes, in barrels made of solid wood, not wood shavings.
That is real. If you want it fake you add wood shavings activated by either flash-microwaving them for 30seconds or running a gas lamp over them and leave the maturing "cask" at ~ 30+C for two months.
The technology differs depending on the volume - up to 3l vessels need nothing more but to be forgotten for 2 months on a Southern European latitude balcony in mid-summer. More than 3l requires active steering of the wood shavings in the spirit. This is the same technology as used by some distilleries to produce a rather authentic looking whiskey, brandy, slivovica, etc at low cost. Just they use actively mixed autoclaves at 60C+ for up to 3-6 months instead.
The end result if done right is achieving the taste equivalent of 3-7 years of maturation in 2-3 months. I have done that plenty of times with home made brandy in the days when I used to "advise" my dad on how to do it.
However, as a professional chemist by trade (which has long surrendered to the dark side of IT), I can tell you that the experiment was pointless outright. YOU CANNOT MATURE A SPIRIT IN ZERO G. It is the same problem as using larger than 3l vessels in fake maturation. You need convection for the activated wood to pick up the "crap" out of the spirit and for the spirit to pick up the flavour and colour out of the wood. No convection will result in a fraction of the process happening in the boundary layer. Everything beyond that will remain unmatured crap.
That is real. If you want it fake you add wood shavings activated by either flash-microwaving them for 30seconds or running a gas lamp over them and leave the maturing "cask" at ~ 30+C for two months.
Also well-known in the wine world, where it makes the difference between a subtly oaky wine matured in oak barrels, and the headache-inducing super-oaked cheap stuff that is swilled around in stainless steel vats with oak shavings. "two buck chuck" being an example.
"I can tell you that the experiment was pointless outright. YOU CANNOT MATURE A SPIRIT IN ZERO G. It is the same problem as using larger than 3l vessels in fake maturation. You need convection for the activated wood to pick up the "crap" out of the spirit and for the spirit to pick up the flavour and colour out of the wood. No convection will result in a fraction of the process happening in the boundary layer. Everything beyond that will remain unmatured crap."
That is the hypothesis they have been testing. What if it turns out better than expected?
>>I can tell you that the experiment was pointless outright. YOU CANNOT MATURE A SPIRIT IN ZERO G
If all our questions could be answered using theory, we wouldn't rely on experiment and empirical evidence. That you think a simple chemist can state the answer without experiment is rather worrying for a trained scientist.
I guess the LHC was a waste of time too?
More seriously, the results suggest that you CAN do this, because they DID. And I'm not sure that your comments on convection are entirely valid; when we're talking years of maturation isn't diffusion alone going to be quite significant?
Agreed - the addition of wood chips is invariably a sign of someone trying to disguise a cheap distillate, generally from extractive industrial 4 column stills. cough *panama* cough.
On the other hand, a company in California by the name of Lost Spirits has succeeded in producing some superb aged spirits ... equivalent to 20yr rums ... in six days.
And I mean they won industry awards, and gained recognition from a lot of the big names before they revealed their process. See http://www.wired.com/2015/04/lost-spirits/ for a good writeup after the reveal.
They do around 550L per run, but to be fair their spirits don't always mix well in cocktails - they've been engineered to be a specific flavour profile, and adulterating the mix can lead to unpredictable results.
The fact you called it "whiskey" shows you know nothing about the manufacturing process of whisky.
The vast majority of Scotch Whisky is matured in former bourbon casks (which is also a whiskey, but not whisky) as the bourbon casks by law can only be used once, hence there is a ready market of once used casks.
The fact you called it "whiskey" shows you know nothing about the manufacturing process of whisky.
The vast majority of Scotch Whisky is matured in former bourbon casks (which is also a whiskey, but not whisky)
I bet you're a hit at parties, informing the girls at length how inferior they are for mixing not only ice but also coke in their whisky which they probably spell using an 'e' anyway knowing them eh!
"Not sure how putting woodshavings in a liquid is in any way supposed to emulate putting liquid in a wooden container, whether it's done with gravity or not."
I've tried this myself (it's called inverse maturation) - a stick of charred oak suspended in a bottle of rubbish whisky for a while led to a transformation into a pleasantly drinkable spirit.
>>The traditional system works perfectly well.
What an abjectly stupid thing to say. The traditional system is a result of centuries of experiment. Authentic whisky was originally just rough moonshine brewed illegally... good job someone was happy to try new things "what do you mean, you want to store your drink in a barrel someone else kept wine in... what a stupid idea".
"(note to posters above, there is no E in Whisky)"
Well, there is no 'e' in this particular whisky, as it comes from Scotland.
Other whiskey does have the 'e' in it.
From Wikipedia:
The spelling of the term "whisky" is often debated by journalists and consumers. Scottish, Australian and Canadian whiskies use "whisky", Irish whiskies use "whiskey", while American and other styles vary in their spelling of the term.
yes, they did keep a control sample on earth, and human taste testing was blind - there is a whitepaper on the Ardbeg website.
And contrary to the headline, those who haven't tried an Ardbeg might be interested to know that rubber, smoked fish and antiseptic lozenge are actually flavours you'd expect in the earth-matured Ardbeg whisky as well, and are actually quite pleasant when mixed in with the other more conventional fruit flavours of spirits which the headline didn't mention. Ardbeg is from Islay, and reaches the extremes of the whisky spectrum, It's much smokier when compared to an easy-drinking Speyside like Glenmorangie for example. Flavour map
Isle of Islay malt from good old M&S smells and tastes like TCP.
Its the single best whisky i have ever tasted... Sadly i dont seem to be able to get it anymore...
I currently have some bourbon oak chunks sat in 2lts of ethanol from my still.
Within 24 hours the colour had changed and the odour had mellowed. In about 4 years i'll report what it tastes like...
"Is that when you get your eyesight back ".
**IF you actually believe that drinking home made spirit made from sugar, water and yeast will send you blind, you need a lesson in fermentation and distilling.
Do you actually have any idea of how much METHANOL is actually contained in home made ETHANOL ? Irrespective of using corn, spuds, sugar etc.
The amount is TINY. As in essentially beyond measure.
The blindness thing is a myth back from the days of prohibition when methanol was added to ethanol to bulk it up.
Modern day analogy is mixing glucose with class A's. Adulteration and nothing more.
** IF you were being sarcastic then fair play to you...
Correct. There is no E in Whisky (which is the stuff from Scotland, like Ardbeg) but there IS an E in whiskey (which is the lovely smooth stuff from the Emerald Isle). Not sure if the stuff from Meriky and Japan should be allowed to use the word though, however it's spelled, and however many awards they win. Welsh chwisgi isn't too bad either, and le Whisky Breton is surprisingly drinkable.
to see if they mutate in to hideous blobs of alien material?
I believe that's what happens to your tongue the morning after you've polished off half a bottle of Ardbeg anyway. So I don't see why space whisky (spisky?) should be any different...
The normal cure is the liberal application of bacon, bread and tea.
You'd be better of losing the bread, and frying the bacon, with eggs, in copious amounts of saturated animal fat (real lard from outdoor-reared pigs for preference). Your liver - and your heart - will thank you.
Speaking of liver, adding 100g or so of the animal liver of your preference (calf's is good, so is lamb's) will give you far in excess of your RDA for everything. Yep, even vitamin C. There's more C in 100g of liver, than 100g of any fruit you care to mention (and, unlike the fruity stuff, it's 100% bioavailable).
It will help because months and months of tedius transit in pitch dark to lug Unobtanium from Ganymede back to Earth will not be bearable without a proper shot of ol' mellow to take the edge off of extreme boredom.
And a local Diablo III server (ranked) would help immensely as well.
Well, once you've drunk the whisky, you simply top up the barrel with the aforementioned urine, but to fool the bosses back on Earth, you squeeze a few of the alcohol cleaning wipes into the mixture, and add in a bit of rubber, plus the previously present wood chips.
This should give a rough approximation of Ardbeg anyway. *Ahem!* [ducks and runs for cover]
Ardbeg is even peatier than Laphroaig, and is a bit on the TCP side for my tastes.
"but to fool the bosses back on Earth, you squeeze a few of the alcohol cleaning wipes into the mixture"
Knowing human nature, I'd be really surprised to learn that there hasn't always been a cobbled together still on the station.
So, drank the good stuff, and replaced it with spaceshine, let that age, lather rinse repeat, and what Ardbeg Distillery received was in fact only a few days old.
further analysis will be carried out to elucidate the creation of the different flavours
Well, yes, it was predictable that somewhere in this study it would say, that, hic, zey really need to, hic, do mooore analyzis, hic. Anozer bottle, hic, please.
:)
I say this as someone who is still trying to drink every last whisky made on earth. Several times if need be.
Interesting advertising experiment but having discovered the differences between 'exactly the same barrels' stored in exactly the same way for 15 years are more than enough to keep me amused I'll leave it to those with more money than sense.
@Stevie 'Bah' double blind testing of whisky is a great idea. I think 1/2 barrel of cask strength 42 year old laphroaig should stop our eyes working!
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