Friday, March 6, 2015

ESPOO, FINLAND—Bottles of beer recovered from a nineteenth-century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea have been sampled by researchers from the VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland and the University of Munich. “These bacteria were still alive,” said Brian Gibson of the VTT Technical Research Centre. “We have a reasonably good idea about what kind of hops were used, different ones than today. These hops would have been harsher, these days they are quite mild. The one surprising thing is the beers were quite mild. The original alcohol level was 4.5 percent, nothing extreme,” he told Discovery News. Seawater had seeped through the bottle’s cork, however, replacing about thirty percent of the bottle’s original contents. Chemical analysis suggests that the beer, which was brewed in the 1840s, was similar to a modern amber or lambic ale. “We looked at esters, which give beer a fruity or flowery taste. Most of the compounds that we would expect were there,” Gibson said. To read about vodka preserved in a bottle from another Baltic shipwreck, see "A 200-Year-Old Bottle's Suprising Contents."