(Newser) – This is probably a little more special than anything your Average Joe has in the liquor cabinet: Three bottles of Mackinlays scotch whisky, which have sat beneath the Arctic ice since 1907, made their way home to Scotland today. The bottles are part of a crate of circa-1897 whisky found beneath a hut Ernest Shackleton used in his Nimrod expedition, reports the AP, and returned via private jet for, ahem, testing.



The crate of whisky was found frozen solid last year, but researchers could hear the whisky in the bottles, unfrozen despite Antarctic temps as low as -22. But we'll never know what the bottles would have fetched on the market: A lab will get six weeks to test and taste the whisky, before it gets returned to its spot beneath Shackleton's hut.

(Read more Scotch stories.)

