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Whisky Aged On NASA's International Space Station Tastes "Different"
MarkWhittington writes: Back in October 2011 Ardbeg Distillery on Islay, the southernmost island of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, sent a vial of whisky to the International Space Station courtesy of Houston based Nanoracks. The idea was the see if microgravity affects the way that whisky ages, particularly the way terpenes that are the building blocks of food and liquors behave. A similar vial was kept on Earth as a comparison. The BBC reported that the contents of the two vials were sampled and compared. As it turns out, pronounced differences were noted.
It would probably impact beer more since beer is carbonated. Because adding CO2 to a liquid turns it acidic, it adds a sour flavor. When you shake carbonated liquid, the CO2 is going to be more likely to combine and turn into a gas, floating to the surface and raising the pH, making it less sour.
Whiskey is a distilled beverage, basically "dead" so to say. Some wines (granted, not all) still have some micro-organisms when they're bottled. Not really countering your point, mind you, just adding in some precisions.
There's nothing like $HOME
In other words. No science was performed in the creation of this blatant attempt to exploit dumb rich people.
That is what I thought at first. Then I went looking for more details and found the paper: The impact of micro-gravity on the release of oak extractives into spirit in which they claim:
Organoleptic Assessment -- multiple micro-gravity and control samples were compared in the sensory laboratory using Ardbeg 'tulip' shaped nosing and tasting glasses, for both triangle tests (in which three 'blind' glasses are compared, two of which contain one sample, and one the other sample) and for detailed aroma and flavour descriptions.
They don't say if it was double-blind or not, but even if it was just single-blind, that's at least passable science.
Since when does the ISS belong to NASA? The headline is misleading - other countries own the majority of it, and Russia is already planning to recycle their bits when the ISS is scrapped.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They actually did a precise chemical analysis, in addition to tasting the whisky.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/science/space-whisky-glass.html?_r=0
The article says that the whisky had lower amounts of compounds that are typically extracted from the oak. Most of what I could find online is pretty light on the details of what's different chemically, but there was definitely more done than tasting.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
GO (fuck yourselves) NASA!!
What's NASA got to do with this?
This was the result of Ardbeg Distillery being invited by a company called NanoRacks to send a vial of whiskey up in a Russian rocket to the International Space Station - which is run by five participating space agencies, only one of which is NASA.
You want to damn an entire agency because a single vial of liquid was taken into space? I'm sure there have been plenty of experiments on different food stuffs in space, but you think that on this occasion this one example shows them to be a sham. Sorry, but that is a textbook case of overreaction. I bet you are still hurt from having your crayon-written application to be an astronaut denied. Or maybe you are just mad that NASA keep producing findings of studies that are at odds to your beliefs about global warming.
Plus, FINALLY, they tell us exactly how they 'aged' the whisky (normal aging entails long-term storage in 'previously used' charred oak barrels).
In the Ardbeg experiment, 32 vials, each with six milliliters of unaged whisky, were sent to the space station in 2011 and then mixed with oak shavings. After 971 days of aging, the whisky returned to Earth last year to be compared with samples that had been aged on the ground. Dr. Lumsden and a panel of experts sniffed and tasted, and he ran them through a battery of chemical analyses.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Real science would have been if they put the two samples in a mass spectrometer and found a significantly different chemistry.
Apparently they did, but that doesn't make sensational headlines.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.