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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.
Whiskey ages in barrels over a period of years, if not decades. A vial in free-fall changes nothing.
This just shows the kind of desperate marketing space needs now to hold interest. An empty, hostile vacuum can only hold interest for so long.
What's next? Useless plastic crap 3D printed in space is mysteriously better too I guess?
I didn't read too far, but how was the impact of aging in space disambiguated from the impact of the transportation process? Shaking and high accelerations come to mind as potentially significantly impacting the whisky. We certainly know these to affect beer...
I've heard of studies where wine tasters offered different opinions based on what they THOUGHT the wine was (including white wines dyed red), so I'm curious how this test was performed. Did the tester know which one was from the ISS? Was there more than one tester?
All quality scotches are corked, as in with a cork
Utter rubbish. Cork is not inherently better than a simple screw-cap (each has their own disadvantages). These days pretty much every brand and bottler I know of (plenty...) uses screw-caps, except for special editions that are meant as expensive gifts or for collectors. Perhaps it was more common in the past, but if you buy an 18, 35 or 50 year old whisky today, chances are that it has been bottled only very recently.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Is it the goal seeked science originated by marketing departments that you like?
Did you really think that after oodles of money was spent on this "experiment" that the answer would be "it tastes the same"?
This is reminiscent of the space souvenir industry in the 1970's, where trinkets that had been "in space" possessed some fetishistic value for collectors.
This isn't science at all. The determination of "it tastes different" was made by those with the profit motive to declare as much.
This is the sort of "science" that nobody should like.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
From the given descriptions, I can make no prediction as to how the flavor of one would differ from the other. The description contains only differences that I would expect from two booze tasters tasting the same booze, or from one booze taster tasting the same booze twice but thinking it's different. Or perhaps someone could translate it to English for me?
First off, I will say that I agree to some extent with your implicit skepticism. There have been a lot of double-blind tests that have shown tasting rates, even by professional judges, to be highly flawed.
That said, have you ever tried to describe the difference in taste of two different whiskies to someone else? You need to come up with some way of characterizing the taste -- and while I often am skeptical of these long descriptions, I frequently find that there's something in the flavor profile that often matches my experience pretty well -- "Wow... yeah, I actually DO taste the 'toffee' " or "The 'plum' note really does stand out here." These things are particularly notable when you're sampling a number of different drinks at the same time.
Also, note that these tastings were done blind, and there were three glasses with two having the same whisky, so there were several ways to discount those characteristics which were apparently just "random" variance with "one booze taster tasting the same booze twice but thinking it's different" or whatever.
Anyhow, there's no way to "translate" this exactly, because it's already English. To me, these descriptions tell me that I'm likely to hate the space sample, which sounds positively awful -- "antiseptic smoke, rubber, and smoked fish" are all things that generally are BAD qualities in a scotch nose. Do you want to drink scotch that smells like rubber and fish? "Antiseptic" is a clue that the taster probably thought the alcohol notes were out of balance. There's also the word "curious" in "curious perfumed note" which again hints that something seems out of place or weird. The actual primary taste sounds okay, though very fruity, but the aftertaste again sounds horrible: "intense" is rarely a good thing in aftertastes, and when you pair it with more "antiseptic" and "rubber" -- it sounds to me that whoever drank this stuff HATED it.
The earth sample, on the other hand, has a nice nose, perhaps bourbon-like from the description. The "antiseptic" is downplayed in the taste (though it probably has a little "burn" given the mention), and the "long lingering aftertaste" is not "intense" but rather a blend of "gentle" and "creamy" pleasant flavors like smoke and fudge.
In short, you might think these are similar descriptions, but the basic effect I get is that the earth-based sample was fairly balanced and pleasant overall, with perhaps a little bit of "bite," but the space sample was wildly out-of-balance and, frankly, terrible. I know some people who like "extreme" whiskies that taste pretty weird, and maybe they'd like the space sample. But I imagine the more interesting conclusion (if anything, from such a small, short study) is that space aging can change which notes are brought out in whisky, and perhaps some sort of combination of aging processes could result in something better. But this study was fairly limited.