Ardbeg, makers of extremely peaty Scotch whisky, has launched samples of its product into space. Not as a gift from Earth to extraterrestrial races, nor even as a refreshment for human astronauts -- no, the idea is to study how whisky ages in zero-gravity conditions.

Scotch gets a lot of its flavor, and all of its color, from aging in oak barrels for decades on end. Precisely what happens in those barrels, on a chemical level, is a very complex and not-entirely-understood process. There's been a lot of analytical science devoted to it, and efforts to get the benefits of aging much faster -- but this is the first time to my knowledge that it's been aged in space.

I'll drink to that line of research.  To read more, click here.