19 Mar 2013 One of the world’s oldest preserved beers to be reproduced

The five bottles of beer, which are amongst the oldest preserved beers in the world, were salvaged in 2010 from a shipwreck that is believed to have sunk in the Åland archipelago southwest of Finland in the 1840s.

The darkness inside the wreck and the low temperatures found on the seabed 50 m (164 ft) below the surface provided the perfect storage conditions, while the pressure inside the bottles kept the salt water from leaking in through the cork.

Thankfully, the salvage team didn’t crack open the beers to toast their find, which also included old bottles of champagne. This gave a team at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland the chance to analyze the beer and the opportunity to recreate the original recipe for modern industrial production methods.

The Stallhagen brewery of Åland will now use the recipe to reproduce the historic beer.

All finds from the shipwreck belong to the Government of Åland, an autonomous region of Finland, which has decided that part of the profits from sales of the beer will go to charitable causes. These include marine archeological work and environmental measures to improve the water quality of the seas.

The shipwreck beer is set to go into production later this year with beer connoisseurs able to try it in June 2014.

Says one commentator: “Nonsense, you can’t copy a beer by just analysing the ingredients there is a lot more to making beer than just the ingredients the variables are almost infinite. You can have 1000 different beers from the same ingredients just by varying things like mash temperature, yeast fermentation temperature, water hardness and acidity just to name a few.

“Beer does not age well like wine so the contents of that bottle won’t resemble what it was like when it was in production. Charity or not this beer won’t resemble the original.”

Source: VTT