World Runs Out of Challenges, Wastes Time

Samples of the world's oldest beer have been taken in a bid to determine
its recipe - and brew it again.

In July 2010, a Baltic Sea shipwreck dated between 1800 to 1830 yielded
many bottles of what is thought to be the world's oldest champagne.

Five of the bottles later proved to be the oldest drinkable beer yet
found.

The local government of the Aland island chain where the wreck was found
has now commissioned a scientific study to unpick the beer's original
recipe.

Divers found the two-mast ship at a depth of about 50 metres in the
Aland archipelago, which stretches between the coasts of Sweden and
Finland in the Baltic Sea.

The ship was believed to be making a journey between Copenhagen in
Denmark and St Petersburg, then the capital of Russia.

The salvaging operation to bring up 145 champagne bottles - since
determined to include vintages from Heidseck, Veuve Clicquot, and Juglar
- had one casualty: a bottle that burst open at the surface, revealing
itself to be beer.

The brew has already been sampled by four professional beer tasters.

"They said that it did taste very old, which is no surprise, with some
burnt notes. But it was quite acidic - which could mean there's been
some fermenting going on in the bottle and with time it's become acid,"
said Annika Wilhelmson of the Technical Research Centre of Finland
(VTT).

VTT has now been commissioned to get to the bottom of the sunken beer's
recipe.

"We're going to try to see if we can find any living yeast or other
microbial cells, because that would be very interesting with respect to
reproducing the beer," Dr Wilhelmson explained.

"So far we have seen under microscopes that there are yeast and
bacterial cells, but we don't know if they're dead or alive yet. If we
can't find living microbes, we will look at the DNA and try to compare
it to brewing yeasts that we know today, to see how similar or different
the yeasts are."

Pinning down which hops have been used on the basis of further chemical
analysis may be difficult, Dr Wilhelmson added, meaning that reviving
the 200-year-old brew for modern drinkers may prove difficult.

"Whatever we analyse, we're going to have to do a lot of interpreting,"
she said. "We need to analyse what it is today and start thinking about
what it was like when it was made - when it was fresh, because it
clearly isn't fresh now."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12393875