Lo-Fi Explainer: What's going to happen to that Space Suntory

Sure, we could just say "we don't really know," but we kind of actually do. Mostly.
Disclaimer: this lo-fi explainer is sometimes fairly hi-fi and quite long. If you are no fun, bail out now.

We already know it won't age anything like the earthbound Suntory whiskies. That's because it's missing the most important part of earth-aging: the casks.

While whisky ages in casks, whisky is absorbed and then expelled from the wood. This allows for chemical exchanges (and changes) that effect the whisky. Things like temperature change, movement, humidity, and time dictate how much of this "breathing" of the whisky happens.

The exchange of particles.

Suntory is not sending whisky to space in casks. They are sending whisky to space in "glass flasks."

So it's not really like we're comparing how whisky ages on earth to space like we're used to - it's more of a comparison of how whisky ages in a bottle on the shelf on earth to how whisky ages in a bottle in space. It's not even like they're sending white whisky to space: the stuff is pre-aged on earth.

You wouldn't expect the character of white whisky to change significantly on a shelf on earth. Space probably won't be much different. Probably.

Things that may actually have an effect on the space whisky:

Zero G.
The whisky will slosh differently. Since motion primarily effects aging by accelerating barrel aging, this probably won't have too much of an effect.

Complex ideas explained through pictures.

More interesting is the way that low-gravity environments will effect surface area, surface tension, and particle diffusion. Simply put, the chemicals in a liquid like whisky pull on each other and change each other over time. With earth gravity, the movements of particles have extra "pull" that may accelerate (or decelerate) those changes as opposed to space.

On earth, when you put a tea bag in the top of your mug, gravity helps pull tea particles out and move them around the mug.

The tea experiment is a real thing they did in space.

In space, the tea has less dispersion, but electrostatic charge may have more of an effect than on earth (click here for an awesome NASA rundown).

Cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are high-energy space particles that come from long-dead exploding stars (probably).

Cosmic rays & you.

There's shielding on the ISS where the whisky will be, but there's still a lot of stuff up there to zap the whisky. Cosmic rays are thought to have effected and mutated DNA, so if they smash into whisky chemicals they could be changed as well.

Solar flares & radiation.
Flares are explosions that the sun occasionally spits out full of ions, electrons, and radiation (more science-y explanation over at wikipedia). In a less intense way, the sun zaps the earth with that stuff all the time (you might be familiar with "sunlight").

Light and other radiation travels through space to the earth.

The earth's atmosphere does a pretty good job of protecting us from most of the bad solar radiation, but the whisky won't be safe from it in space. This'll be interesting in combination with the way that electrostatic forces effect particle dispersion (uh, that NASA thing again).


Aliens.
I'm not saying it's aliens...

CAPTION REDACTED

...but it's aliens.

Basically, Suntory is trying to see if the chemical-changing effects of space will "mellow" whisky in a similar way to that of cask aging, even to a much lesser degree... oh who are we kidding. Suntory is trying to figure out if there's any effect at all on the whisky so that they can sell it for a bajillion dollars. Think about it like the appeal of Jefferson's Ocean, but times like a million.

• You can read Suntory's announcement here in Japanese, or here in English, and here's a nice WSJ article.

• If you'd like some less-science-y hypotheses, check out our article on what science fiction says will happen.

• Lastly, if you want more whisky in space, check out this experiment that Ardbeg took part in.