Talk about your aged beer; scientists in Europe have popped the tops on bottles of beer sitting in a shipwreck under the Baltic since the 1840s to get a look at brewing recipes and techniques of the time.
Well, they didn't actually open the bottles; they inserted needles through the corks sealing the two bottles of beer, recovered from the shipwreck in 2010, to obtain samples.
The beer samples smelled and tasted about what you'd expect 170-year-old beer to smell and taste like, displaying a funky aroma and a sour taste, they found.
Still, the researchers were more interested in brewing history than in the beer's condition today, so they ran samples through a battery of scientific tests.
In a study published in the Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry, the researchers described the smell of the beer as a combination of "autolyzed yeast, dimethyl sulfide, Bakelite, burnt rubber, over-ripe cheese, and goat with phenolic and sulfery notes."
All right, so no beer festival blue ribbon for this brew, then.
The beer in the two bottles were different from each other, the researchers report, one with a strong character of hops and the other with a milder, fruity note.
Chemical analysis by researchers at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Technical University of Munich to get an idea of the initial recipe yielded evidence of flavors very similar to modern beers, although there was a rose-flavor phenylethanol compound you wouldn't find in a modern beer, they said.
The brews were very likely more sour than most modern-day beers, they said, because in the mid-1800s brewers had no way of keeping acid-producing bacteria away from the beer during the brewing process.
Finnish brewing company Stallhagen provided part of the funding for the research and has produced a replica brew using the results of the scientists' analysis.
Little is known about the shipwreck, what its destination was, where it had come from, or even its name.
In addition to the bottles of beer, divers investigating the wreck discovered more than 150 bottles of champagne.
