This week: Three hobbies, one inbox. Welcome back to Wristmas & The W's.

Last issue ended on a 30-year-old Benromach. This one starts about 400 kilometers straight up, where a team in Glasgow wants to find out what Scotch does in orbit. Then we come back down for a 125-proof wheater, a $30 digital watch that just learned to count your steps, Marty McFly's calculator watch, and a Jeep wearing a name I have some history with.

Let's get into it.

A team led by Dr. Gilles Bailet at the University of Glasgow, working with students in Japan, plans to put Scotch on a rocket in 2028. The experiment, nicknamed "Space Puffin," will ride a SpaceX resupply mission to the International Space Station and then be deployed into orbit from the station's Japanese module [1]. There's no barrel on board. The cubesat (a satellite about the size of a loaf of bread) carries small samples of whisky and its raw ingredients, with wood chips standing in for the cask [1]. Sensors will send color and chemistry data back to Earth [2], and the craft won't be recovered at the end of its five-year mission [3].

The interesting part is the temperature. On Earth, whisky "breathes": as a warehouse warms, the spirit expands and pushes into the wood; as it cools, it pulls back out, carrying extracted compounds with it. Bailet says the process isn't well understood, but in orbit those cycles could run much faster, with temperatures swinging between roughly -150 and 200 degrees [1]. The satellite circles the planet every 90 minutes, and the team hopes all that hot-cold whiplash speeds up maturation [4]. Anyone who has run a qPCR plate knows what aggressive thermal cycling can do in a short time. This is the same idea, applied to oak instead of DNA.

There's a catch, and we already have data on it. In 2011, Ardbeg sent new-make spirit and charred oak shards to the ISS; the experiment ran for 971 days before returning in September 2014 [5]. The space samples ended up with more wood extractives overall but fewer of the major flavor-active oak compounds than the Earth controls, which Ardbeg read as microgravity partially inhibiting extraction [6, 7]. That makes sense physically. On Earth, warm liquid rises and cool liquid sinks, which constantly stirs the spirit against the wood (convection). Remove gravity and you lose that stirring, leaving slow diffusion to do the work. Even so, every taster could pick out the space sample, describing smoked fish, rubber and a perfumed note of cassis or violet [5].

Ardbeg's vials never left the climate-controlled station. Space Puffin goes outside [1], so for the first time we'll see weightlessness and extreme thermal cycling acting together. The bigger goal isn't the drink: the system will show how ethanol, which is used in making many drugs, can be extracted in orbit [4], and Bailet calls whisky "a very recognisable, very well-understood model" for studying chemistry in microgravity [3]. He thinks bringing back a full litre within three to five years is realistic [2].

I fully support this. It's real (and fun) science, it uses whisky as a model system, and if it works, somebody gets to write "aged in low Earth orbit" on a label. I don't want to know what that bottle costs.

Barton 1792 is bottling its wheated bourbon at 125 proof, the same strength it went into the barrel [8]. That's the legal maximum entry proof for bourbon [9], so this is as hot as a barrel-proof-at-entry wheater gets. The recipe matches 1792 Sweet Wheat, introduced in 2015, which uses wheat in place of rye [10]; Sweet Wheat sits at 91.2 proof [11], so this is a jump of about 34 proof points. It rolls out this month in California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois in 375ml bottles at $39.99 [8].

Next week, I’ll be diving into a review of the Remus Repeal X! And boy, is it good. 🙂

Casio introduced the F-91W in June 1989 as the successor to the F-87W, and it's been popular ever since for three reasons: it's cheap, the battery lasts forever and the design is instantly recognizable [12]. Casio rates it at plus or minus 30 seconds a month on a battery life of around seven years [13]. A good mechanical watch can drift that much in a week. This one costs less than a decent strap.

The secret is a sliver of quartz. Quartz is piezoelectric: squeeze it and it produces a small voltage, apply a voltage and it flexes. Put it in a circuit that feeds that signal back in and the crystal rings at its natural frequency, like a tuning fork that never stops. In nearly every quartz watch, the crystal is literally cut into a tiny tuning fork shape and trimmed to vibrate at 32,768 times per second [14].

That oddly specific number is 2 to the 15th power. A chain of simple divide-by-two circuits halves it fifteen times and lands on exactly one pulse per second, which is what drives the display [14]. If you've ever done a serial dilution in the lab, it's the same logic: fifteen 1:2 steps and you're right where you need to be. The frequency itself is a compromise. Go lower and the crystal gets physically larger; go higher and the watch burns more power [14]. 32,768 Hz is the sweet spot that lets a coin cell run the whole thing for years.

This year, for the first time in a long time, Casio has actually changed the formula. Two new versions landed in the US this fall, and they say a lot about what each added feature costs.

The F-B100W (sold in the US as the FB100W) is the F-91W with an accelerometer and Bluetooth [15]. It counts steps, shows the daily total on the screen, lets you set a goal between 1,000 and 50,000 steps and beeps at you when you've been sitting too long [16]. It also sets its own time from your phone [15]. It sold out on launch day in Japan and now costs $64.95 in the US, in a slightly larger 41.9 x 38.1 x 8.8mm case weighing 26 grams [16].

Here's the energy math. The battery is now rated for about two years instead of seven [15, 16]. Roughly three and a half times shorter life, so the watch is drawing about three and a half times more power on average. That's the cost of a sensor that's always listening and a radio that checks in with your phone. There's also a nice irony: the phone sync means the quartz crystal's accuracy hardly matters anymore, because the watch is borrowing time from your phone. Like the original, it's only splash resistant, so don't swim in it [17].

If you want the original with no electronics added, the F-91WF swaps the resin band for a woven strap made from recycled PET fibers, in black, navy or olive [18]. Everything else stays put: same 21 grams, same seven-year battery, same plus or minus 30 seconds a month [13]. It costs $45.95 against $29.95 for the resin version on Casio's site [18], which is a lot to pay for a strap. The olive F-91WF-3A is the standout of the three.

It's October 21, 2015. Marty McFly and Doc Brown step out of a time-traveling DeLorean into a future full of hoverboards, self-lacing sneakers, and flying cars. Also, unbeknownst to the writers of Back to the Future Part II, they've just landed on my actual birthday, and predicted my Chicago Cubs would win a World Series in my lifetime. A movie that nails my birthday and my baseball team in the same scene doesn't just become a favorite, it becomes personal. Great Scott, indeed.

So when Casio announced a Back to the Future collaboration for the film's 40th anniversary, I had to have one. Big thanks to Worn & Wound for hooking me up with it. I'm a scientist by trade who also happens to love skateboarding, cars, and clocks and watches, so this collab hits basically every box I've got. And Marty wears a Casio calculator watch throughout the trilogy, so a Casio x Back to the Future collab wasn't optional. It was inevitable. Where we're going, we're definitely wearing this watch.

The CA-500WEBF-1A is Casio's tribute to the calculator watch Marty wears on screen, reworked with DeLorean styling instead of the black resin case from the films. It launched around Back to the Future Day (October 21) in the UK and EU, with the US release following on October 27, 2025, at $120.

The CA-500WEBF-1A is built on the CA-500 platform, the same calculator watch chassis Casio has run since the 1980s, now finished in a chrome-plated resin case with a single-link stainless steel bracelet standing in for the DeLorean's brushed metal panels. At 34.4mm wide and just 53 grams, it's tiny by modern standards, and that's exactly the point: a faithful shrink-ray version of what Marty actually wore, no plutonium required.

The bracelet is a bit of a hair puller if you've got a hairy wrist like mine, a common complaint across this whole style of Casio. If the bracelet bugs you, swap it for a strap. The TQ18 straps from StrapHabit fit perfectly.

The best detail on the whole watch is on the case back: a flux capacitor engraved into the steel. I promise I hadn't hit my head on the toilet before I noticed it. It's subtle enough that it reads as a watch back until you actually look.

The dial keeps the classic CA-500 three-eye digital layout but reworks the color scheme to echo the DeLorean's time circuit displays and taillights, with "OUTATIME since 1985" across the top. It's a restrained execution: the reference is there for people who know, not shouted at everyone else. Underneath, it's a fully functional calculator watch with an 8-digit calculator, dual time, stopwatch, alarm and full auto calendar. No Mr. Fusion needed to keep it running.

The watch ships in a box styled like a vintage VHS cassette. It's a great idea, though I wish the card stock were sturdier so a box this cool could hold up as a display piece.

Back in June, I told you Stellantis had quietly put the Scrambler name back on its roadmap. This week it showed up in metal. On the eve of SEMA, Jeep unveiled the Wrangler Scrambler SRT Concept: a two-door pickup with a usable bed and the first independent front suspension ever fitted to a Wrangler-branded vehicle [19]. It's also the first Jeep-brand vehicle to wear an SRT badge [20].

The hardware is serious. It runs a 6.4-liter Hemi V8 making 470 horsepower and 470 lb-ft, with 14 inches of front suspension travel, 15 in the rear, a Trophy Truck-style rear axle and 37-inch tires [19]. The suspension was developed with off-road racer Casey Currie and builds on the system from the Jeep Striker Concept [19, 21], which ran a 707-horsepower Hellcat V8 [22]. The bed has jump seats that face forward or swing around toward the tailgate, and the whole thing is painted a shade Jeep calls Punk'n orange [19].

The front suspension is the real story. Every Wrangler so far has used a solid front axle: one rigid beam tying both wheels together. That's ideal for crawling over rocks, because when one wheel climbs, the beam pushes the other one down into the dirt for traction. At 60 mph across the desert, it becomes a problem. A hit on one side upsets the other, and all that heavy axle (unsprung mass, meaning the weight the springs don't carry) has too much inertia to follow the ground quickly. Independent suspension lets each wheel react on its own with less weight to move, which keeps the tires planted and the steering calm. Jeep says the goal is stability, steering precision and wheel control at desert-racing speeds [19]. Translation: this is a Wrangler built to go fast, not slow.

The Scrambler name was last used on the CJ-8 pickup, which ended in 1986 [23]. Jeep's announcement puts it plainly: "The original Scrambler became an icon because it broke the rules" [24]. Seeing the name on something this unhinged makes me happy. Especially since I wanted to rebuild that one we got from my neighbor growing up.

Now the fine print. This is a concept. Jeep hasn't confirmed a production Scrambler, and nobody knows yet whether the independent suspension or the V8 would make it to a showroom [19]. So the Scrambler is confirmed as a real, physical thing. It isn't confirmed as something you can buy, yet. I'll take the win anyway.

The rest of the show runs November 3 to 6 in Las Vegas, and the reveal schedule includes a HayesX-250 flying vehicle and a Lamborghini Murciélago "Batmobile," because of course it does [25]. The build worth the walk is Ringbrothers' "Billie," a 1965 Pontiac GTO convertible that took more than 5,500 hours, with a body widened five inches and more than 650 horsepower [26]. It sits on a Roadster Shop chassis with a carbon fiber hood and door skins [27].

Toyota went the other direction and put snow tracks on its whole body-on-frame lineup: the Tundra, Tacoma, 4Runner, Land Cruiser and Sequoia, all as Snowhunter concepts [28]. Don't write them off as a gimmick. Toyota's Trailhunter trim started as a SEMA concept Tundra in 2022 [29], so parts of these could end up at a dealer, probably minus the tracks. Stoked to see where this goes, and will report as SEMA runs. 

Outro: That's issue 31. To recap: scientists want to age Scotch by spinning it around the planet every 90 minutes, Barton put a wheater in a small bottle at full strength, Casio showed that a step counter costs five years of battery life (and that Marty's calculator watch still holds up), and Jeep built the Scrambler we've been asking for and then told us not to get our hopes up.

Got thoughts on any of it? Hit reply. I read everything.

Until next time: pour something good, wear something you love and drive like the Scrambler's watching.

Cheers.