A liquor made from Chernobyl apples exists—but it may be some time before you can buy it

In an effort to destigmatize farming around Pripyat, Ukraine—the area surrounding Chernobyl—a team of Ukrainian and British scientists planted apples, which were turned into a liquor with local water and rye grain. Sounds perfectly safe, right? That’s what the contingent of scientists were hoping to prove with the finished product, called Atomik liquor, which was first bottled in 2019. But when the U.K.-based team tried to import the batches a few months back, the Ukrainian government interfered and stopped the transaction. “The reason they gave was they thought the bottles had forged duty stamps on,” one of the researchers told ABC News. “But they clearly had the U.K. stamps on. We hope it was just a mistake.” After a few positive court hearings in Kyiv, the producers are hoping the seized bottles will be allowed to travel to their final destination, where Atomik will be sold for $50 a pop, with some of the money going back to Chernobyl’s “exclusion zone” to continue farming.