I’ve been to a lot of distilleries, and I’ve learned to laugh at what counts as “important”. Spoiler: it’s whatever they do on site.
If they malt the barley themselves, that’s crucial. If they buy it in, it doesn’t matter.
If the whisky is stored on site, you can taste the sea or the grass from the nearby fields. If it’s shipped elsewhere to mature, that’s not important. You get the gist.
The one thing they all agree on is that the size, shape and material of the still matter enormously, dents included, and that nobody quite knows why. (Kilchoman is the exception. They’re much more upfront about science over folklore.) I realise the tour is storytelling, but they all have the same folklore about their stills.
So when I saw “Scotland and Japan team up to study whisky in space”, I was hoping for a stunt. Instead, it’s real science.
The University of Glasgow and Japan’s Kyushu Institute of Technology are sending whisky and a fragment of cask wood into space. It will also be the first time whisky is exposed to the vacuum of space rather than staying inside the ISS, and it will be instrumented to understand changes in the composition.
The real aim is to use whisky as a well-understood model for chemical and biological processes in microgravity, in particular how fermentation can be monitored and controlled. That matters because ethanol is a key ingredient in making many drugs, both as a solvent and as a starting material for other compounds. If you want to manufacture pharmaceuticals in orbit, producing your own ethanol by fermentation, as in whisky making, is a sensible place to start.
And microgravity could be a big win for drug production. Without gravity-driven convection, crystals can grow larger and purer, which affects how stable a drug is and how well the body absorbs it. Proteins might even fold in new ways that do interesting new things in the body.
So they aren’t currently building a distillery in space. They’re starting to work out how to do chemistry where bubbles don’t rise and precipitates don’t sediment. On Earth, we have folklore. In orbit, they’ll have instrumentation, and I think that’s an interesting and potentially very useful piece of work. Please also note, that The Engineer missed the better title from the University of Glasgow news who went for making “spirits in the sky” (thanks for the earworm guys!).
Original article: Scotland and Japan team up to study whisky in space, The Engineer