Divers who found bottles of Guinness dating back to the mid-19th century on a shipwreck off Dover want to try and rebrew the stout.
As The Irish Times reports, up to 20 bottles of stout were discovered by a team of divers exploring the wreckage of the Mindora sailing barque last summer.
They have recently acquired a survey report linking the cargo to a recorded ship of that time.
The Mindora had set sail from London to Vancouver when it collided with another vessel off the coast of Dover on November 27th, 1864,
Since making the discovery, Stefan Panis, an expedition diver who made the discovery, and Paweł Truszynski, a technical diver and historical researcher, have begun what they call “Project Jurassic Beer”.
Truszynski said they have enlisted the help of Kevin Verstrepen, professor of microbiology and genetics at Leuven University in Brussels, in an attempt to rebrew the Guinness to mimic exactly how it would have tasted in 1864.
A spokesperson for Diageo Ireland said the Guinness Archive team “has been in communication with the divers to gather more information and evaluate the find”.
Guinness and the Sea
Guinness was already an established export product by the time the Mindora sank.
Arthur Guinness had signed the celebrated 9,000-year lease on the St James’s Gate brewery in Dublin in 1759, more than a century before the bottles went to the bottom off Dover.
If the Mindora cargo can be authenticated and successfully studied, the bottles could provide an unusual glimpse of the stout being exported during the Victorian era.
Read The Irish Times here
