YOU could call it ''Raiders of the Lost Beer''. An adventure through time, space and breweries, from the flowering beer industry of colonial Melbourne in the 1860s to an antique bookshop in the US state of Maine. It will climax on Monday, when a beer recipe not seen or tasted in 130 years will come to life.

While the taste and colour of the beer remains a mystery, what is known is that a team of brewers will create Melbourne history in a glass. They will give today's drinkers a sense of what Melburnians were swigging from beer glasses when the city was a mere 20 years old and the capital of the Victorian colony.

Jason Oliver and Marcus Cox will bring a bygone beer back to life. Credit:Justin McManus

Rather than a timeworn treasure map leading to hidden relics, brewers at Brunswick's Thunder Road Brewing will rely on a recipe jotted down by Alfred Terry, a brewer who came to Melbourne in 1851 and who was a pioneer of Australia's beer industry.

It is his recipe that Thunder Road senior brewer Marcus Cox and Jason Oliver, the brewmaster of Devils Backbone Brewing Co, Virginia, US, will faithfully re-create. In doing so they will resurrect a beer first made for the Carlton Brewery, which traces its history to Melbourne's Bouverie Street in 1864 and is a forerunner of today's Carlton & United Breweries.