Deuhs began by giving a bit of history. “Peter Ballantine started this brewery in the 1800s, and I have seen one bottle that appears to be turn of the 1900s—not in their special holiday packaging that they used [starting] in the 30s. So I do believe they made it at some level before Prohibition.”

“Every year they would select certain tanks to either blend or package a tank as is. On the label they would post the brew date as well as the packaging date. Normally the packaging date was November 11th of every year. There were beers that were brewed in the forties and packaged in the sixties. The last Ballantine Burton Ale I had was brewed in 1946 and packaged in ’64.”

The early batches from the 1930s were only five or so years old, but later vintages might have been aged up to 20 years before bottling. It seems that the brewers just looked at their stock and decided what to package. “They were wood tanks; some were cypress and some were American oak. They were not lined with pitch, no. And they used the same tanks for IPA, which they aged a year.”

I then asked how he went about reconstructing the beer. He said, “The only thing we did know was: we did know the color, and we had a good idea on the alcohol, and when we did the research on the Ballantine IPA, we did talk to a lab manager of the brewery in Newark that told us what he thought the Burton ale was. He thought it was a stronger version of the IPA.”

Deuhs also added that having the brew logs may not have helped much. I've seen old logs and I know what he means. He explains: “You don’t really glean very much information from the brewing logs because it wasn’t really until the 50s that they cared about the variety of the hops and IBUs and such. The recipes that I have that go back from 1900 to 1930 of Pabst products, they have x amount of pale malt and x amount of corn and 20 pounds of Yakima hops and 30 pounds of import hops. So they didn’t call out any varieties by names. We have a hops supplier who’s very knowledgeable in this area, and they told us the hops that were most likely available for the hops when the beer was made. We knew that Ballantine liked using Brewers Gold, so we used Brewers Gold in it, and most likely Clusters. When we compared the 1946 brew with the 2015 brew, the color was almost exactly the same and some of those malt characters were very close.”

The original Ballantine tanks were "squat and horizontal." Pabst brews its Ballantine line at the Cold Spring Brewery in Minnesota, a contract facility that dates back 125 years. That was good because, “at Cold Spring they looked similar.” They were, however, metal tanks and wouldn't contribute any of the oxidative or wood character of the original. “So then we filled the bottom of the tank with wood staves from the barrel mill. We used the medium toast. And then we put in a bunch of hops with the beer, plus right before packaging we put in some hop oils.” Deuhs conditioned the beer for six months at 50 degrees, then bottled the beer and let it sit in bottles at 40 degrees for two more years. That's why the vintage released this year was 2015.