The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania has achieved scientific results of interest to beer brewers and drinkers worldwide.
The museum has identified what is believed to be the world's oldest beer, surviving as contents of a bottle salvaged from the protected Historic Shipwreck Sydney Cove (1797) at Preservation Island, Tasmania.
The brew was reproduced thanks to elaborate research by Finnish and Belgian scientists who teamed up after the wreckage was discovered off Finland's Aaland Islands in 2010.
Divers exploring 40 feet down found only five bottles of beer next to 145 champagne bottles -- confirmed as the world's oldest drinkable bubbly -- in the long-lost wreck. The Government of the autonomous Åland Islands is the owner of the findings and had the beers analyzed at VTT Technical Research Center in Finland.
A few bottles of beer were found in an old shipwreck in the archipelago of Åland in Finland during the summer of 2010. Researchers have now managed to isolate four different species of live lactic acid bacteria from the beer.
The 2010 discovery of the ship, believed to have sunk in the 1840s, also included the world's oldest champagne considered drinkable which has since been auctioned off.
