Taste Test: A Craft Distillery Sent Its Bourbon Into the Stratosphere. The Gimmick Worked.
The whiskey world is full of gimmicks, most of which are focused on maturation: putting barrels onto container ships to sail the seven seas, using every type of cask finish you can think of, even blasting barrels with heavy metal to encourage interaction between wood and whiskey. All that pales in comparison to sending a barrel into space, or at least space-adjacent, to see what effect it will have on the whiskey. A Colorado distillery called Mile High Spirits did just that recently, and I have to admit that the bourbon is pretty good—although there are a few variables that might have affected the outcome.
Let’s be clear: Sending whiskey into the stratosphere is indeed a gimmick, and it’s one that has precedence. A North Carolina distillery announced last year that it was sending its whiskey into space to mature, single malt giant the Glenlivet rocketed some barley to the International Space Station to see what the effects are, and the always experimenting Ardbeg distillery performed a similar test on its distillate about a decade ago. While this new stunt didn’t exactly replicate any of these, it’s still aimed as much at getting attention (see this review) as it is at finding out what this does to whiskey.
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The distillery in question is called Mile High Spirits, a small craft operation and cocktail bar located in Denver. Its core expression, Fireside Bourbon, is made from a mashbill of 70 percent corn, 20 percent rye, and 10 percent malted barley. Craft whiskey can vary dramatically in terms of flavor, but this is a decent bourbon that is bottled in bond, meaning it’s a minimum of four years old, exactly 100 proof, and the product of one distillery and distillation season. This is the same whiskey that the distillery chose to kiss the sky, loading it onto a balloon operated by a space tourism company called World View.
I spoke with Wyn Ferrel, the owner of Mile High Spirits, to find out more. The bourbon was put onto the balloon in a small three-gallon barrel, and it launched at 7:03 a.m. on July 15, 2021 from Page, Arizona. It reached an apogee of 106,627 feet, starting at 1,000 millibars of atmosphere and heading all the way do down to nine millibars, with the temperature veering from 90 degrees Fahrenheit on the ground to -94 at its highest point. Those are some extreme shifts in pressure and heat, but the whiskey spent just 94 minutes at apogee over the course of its nearly five hour trip. Normally, it takes years for a whiskey to be affected by the interaction between liquid and wood as the humidity and temperature fluctuate. So this was sort of an accelerated version of that process, which was amplified by the small barrel size increasing the liquid’s surface area contact.
The distillery was kind enough to send a bottle of pre-stratosphere bourbon to taste alongside the Strato Whiskey. This sort of functioned as a control, but as mentioned before there are a couple of caveats. The regular Fireside Bourbon is more than five years old, while the Strato Whiskey is six years old. Taken on its own, that age difference would impact the flavor somewhat, even though it’s only a matter of several months. But Strato Whiskey spent another three years inside that small barrel after its balloon trip before being bottled this year, and that fact is not insignificant. It might be more telling to try the whiskey right after its space adventure to see what immediate effect it had upon the flavor. But I guess the point here is that this journey could have affected the whiskey on a molecular level, or that the burst of accelerated wood-whiskey interaction pushed the maturation to another stage which had ripple effects over the course of the last few years.
Whatever the case may be, Strato Whiskey is pretty good, but it’s also quite intense. “The whiskey has our traditional bourbon profile, but on the backend you get bitter notes like Campari, and almost some metallic flavors,” Ferrel told me. “It’s a flavor that I’ve never experienced from barrel aging on earth.” Perhaps he’s onto something here. The mouthfeel is much thicker than the regular Fireside Bourbon, with big notes of dark fruit, caramel, molasses, licorice, and spice on the palate, compared to lighter green fruit, balsa wood, and an overall nuttiness to the original. There is a pronounced tannic character to this space whiskey, but it’s not overbearing, with some fresh orange zest and custard notes along for the ride. And despite the small barrel size, it really doesn’t taste like a mini-cask bourbon.
Ferrel put this experiment in an existential context, referring to humanity’s inevitable march towards space life (which may be an exaggeration, but certainly helps the marketing). “Whiskey is so rooted in tradition, and I think there’s a curiosity about breaking the mold,” he said. “[Products like this] are foundational stepping stones of humanity moving towards this huge shift. I’m not gonna say this contributes to the greater space race, but people feel like they can be a part of humanity’s history by obtaining one of these Strato Whiskey boxes.” Sure, let’s look at this in a more grounded way—it’s a cool whiskey gimmick that actually might have had an effect on the flavor, although there are some other variables that could have also played a part. The real question is this: Are you are willing to pay $350 for a 50-ml sample of Strato Whiskey (that admittedly comes in a pretty cool box)? If you are, you can buy one of 500 sets from the Mile High website, and see for yourself whether this bourbon is out of this world or it failed like an exploding SpaceX rocket.
Score: 85
100 Worth trading your first born for
95 – 99 In the Pantheon: A trophy for the cabinet
90 – 94 Great: An excited nod from friends when you pour them a dram
85 – 89 Very Good: Delicious enough to buy, but not quite special enough to chase on the secondary market
80 – 84 Good: More of your everyday drinker, solid and reliable
Below 80 It’s alright: Honestly, we probably won’t waste your time and ours with this
Every week Jonah Flicker tastes the most buzzworthy and interesting whiskeys in the world. Check back each Friday for his latest review.
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