170-year-old shipwreck beer tastes pretty much like you'd expect

Sometimes, when you're cleaning out your fridge, you find a bottle of beer at the back. Label might have slipped a little. No idea how long it's been in there. Could have been years. But if it's the only one in there, you have to ask yourself: should I drink it?

Just kidding. Obviously, you should. It's beer. But here's a better example: you find a few bottles of beer in a shipwreck in the Baltic Sea that have been there since the 1840s. Looks like a little seawater got in there. You'll analyze it, obviously — and scientists have just published the results of that analysis. But should you drink it?

Just kidding. Obviously, you should. It's beer. And they did. Four years ago, As It Happens host Carol Off talked to Annika Wilhelmson of the VTT Technical Research Centre in Espoo, Finland about the result.

"It had definitely changed," Wilhelmson tells Carol about their taste test. "It was quite sulphur-y, it was a bit like cheese, and it had some burnt notes and the taste was very acid."

Scientists with the VTT Centre — along with colleagues from the University of Munich — have now published their research on that old beer. Apparently, before the shipwreck, it would have tasted…pretty much like beer.

The hops were "harsher" than they are nowadays, and it would have had more of a floral aroma. But it was 4.5 per cent alcohol, and evidently it would have been like a modern amber ale.

Oh, and its bouquet was as follows: "autolyzed yeast, dimethyl sulfide, Bakelite, burnt rubber, over-ripe cheese, and goat, with phenolic and sulfury notes."

You know, like Bud Lime.