Whiskey

International soccer star/celebrity/Posh Spice–husband David Beckham has gone from his own brand of underwear to something we care about much more—his own brand of whisky. Called Haig Club, the single-grain Scotch claims to have notes of “butterscotch and toffee” and promises to be essential drinking for anyone who’s still lamenting the way England’s national team performed sans-Beckham in last summer’s World Cup.

A new company called Whiskey Elements started with one question: “What’s the difference between top shelf and well whiskey?” Of course, there’s a lot of history and tradition that goes into making great hooch, but the simplest answer is the taste. Good whiskey can age in oak barrels for decades, a process that adds a range of rich flavors as well as a spirit’s signature amber color.

How would whisky taste after being aged in space? It’s a question that has likely been pondered by everyone from Buzz Aldrin to George Jetson. Earthlings are about to find out the answer as a three-year experiment returns from orbit on September 12.

In Scotland, a company called Celtic Renewables has devised a way to power cars using the massive amount of by-product leftover from distilling Scotch. Celtic founder Martin Tangney is taking some of the hundreds of thousands of tons of spent barley and the billions of liters of liquid waste, called pot ale, generated by whiskey production each year and feeding it to bacteria called clostridium. The result is a fuel that can go directly into a car’s fuel tank, no engine alterations required.

Every week by this point you have undoubtedly spent nearly 100 percent of your time online watching videos of cats riding vacuum cleaners and finding out which character from Blossom you really are. Meanwhile, the world has been going on without you. Here are some things you missed while you were buried in the Internet:

In 1979, a bartender in Connecticut named Charles Burke Cronin Oat created a drink with three of Ireland’s most beloved adult beverages—Jameson Irish whiskey, Bailey’s and Guinness—and named it after an act of terrorism that has haunted generations of Irish citizens. Needless to say, this was not the American bartending community’s finest moment. Ah, but you know the old saw about dark clouds and silver linings...in the early-aughts, sales of Irish Car Bombs blew up stateside (sorry, couldn’t help myself) paving the way for an explosion (there I go again) in Irish whiskey’s popularity.