expend close to 200 years at the bottom of the ocean is hardly the idealistic formula for an award - winning beer ; this beverage more often than not does not improve with years , have alone when exposed to seawater . But while the brews recuperate from an 1840s shipwreck may now reek like stinky cheese and taste like goat , an analysis of the compounds inside the vintage beer let on that they had a similar composition to modernistic Clarence Day lagers and ales and therefore probably did n’t taste that dissimilar to today ’s suds .
Although slightly older beer has been discovered antecedently , according to the authors of the discipline , this is the first metre that chemical substance analyses have been performed on beer this old . Their findings have been published in theJournal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry .
Back in 2010 , a wreck was discovered at the bottom of the Baltic Sea close to a vast archipelago belonging to Finland known as the Åland Islands . Although the exact eld of the glide watercraft is unknown , several argumentation of archeological evidence suggest the ship is from thesecond quarter of the 19thcentury .
Aboard the ship were 168 bottles of Champagne-Ardenne , which were later found to be acombination of Veuve Clicquot and Juglar . Many were broken and contaminated but a few manage to survive and , remarkably , still tasted “ pretty proficient ” thanks to being laid horizontally at a abject temperature and in the darkness . Unfortunately , the same could not be say for the five bottleful of beer that were also found on the wreck .
When frogman tried to take the beers back to land , one of the bottle split up and a frothy liquidness began to exude from the cracks . It ’s not every twenty-four hour period that you are presented with the opportunity to taste 170 - twelvemonth - old beer , so one of the divers decided to give this one a draft and , ostensibly , it stillretained a beery taste .
The bottles were then whisked off to the Technical Research Center of Finland where a squad of research worker adjudicate to analyse the chemical make-up of two of them . Although they still retained the aesthetics of beer with a hopeful aureate yellow colouration and picayune haze , they for certain did n’t smell like it . Both of them smell like a tempting combination of Bakelite — an early synthetical plastic renowned for its shady olfactory property — burnt golosh , overly - ripe cheeseflower , goat and dimethyl sulfide , which is ordinarily equate to rotting cabbage . These unsuitable note are belike attributable to the ontogenesis of bacteria inside the bottles , which would have produced a heap of constitutive acids .
So it sense rank — but how did it try out ? on the face of it , the overwhelming taste of vinegar , goat ( again ) and soured milk masked any fruitiness or maltiness . Although it ’s unsufferable to get it on the accurate original taste , their chemical composition gave some wind . For example , both were made with hop , but one contained more and was thus more bitter . Both beer had eminent levels of a compound that gives an orchard apple tree flavor , and the less bitter beer was particularly mellow in compounds that bestow rose and sweet apple flavor . Interestingly , they had unusually low concentrations of one of the major spirit element of fermented alcohol-dependent drinkable , 3 - Methylbuty acetate , which givebananaor pear drops flavor . Overall , they probably would have been moderately interchangeable in mouthful to modern day beer , the researcher reason out .
[ ViaThe Journal of Food and Agricultural ChemistryandLive Science ]
