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Image credit: DR Nyheder
Giving new meaning to the whole concept of beer cellaring, an historic cache of deliberately hidden away beer has been discovered in Denmark.
Construction workers in the city of Viborg have uncovered seven bottles of 113-year-old beer under floorboards in a building which housed the Odin Brewery from 1832-1988, once the oldest brewery in Denmark.
Speaking to DR Nyheder, Ersted Møller, a curator at the Viborg Museum explained the more than a century old beers which were housed in a wooden box along with a message…
“The bottles are in exquisite condition with corks and labels intact. It looks like an entire palette of beer from back then. We have bottles from the Odin Brewery at the museum, but none with any content. I’ve spoken with beer experts who estimate that Odin beer from 1906 is very rare.”
“It could be fun to know what a Viborg beer tasted like back in 1906. Odin is a large part of Viborg’s history, and finding these beers is a fascinating prospect that shouldn’t be ignored.”
The Odin Brewery in its prime : Viborg Museum.DK
Unfortunately it was later learned that two of those beers had not survived the test of time… “Two of the corks had perished and the beer had evaporated,” according to the “Drinks Business” but the five remaining bottles remained full and in good condition.”
The beer ‘time capsule’ came with a note, handwritten by the then head brewer, CE Pehrsson that was dated March 20 1906 and read…
“The old floor was removed by master carpenter Niels Nielsen and a new floor was added. As we don’t know how long this floor will last, these words and some bottles of beer we brew these days will be put under the floor.”
In 2008, fellow Danish brewer Carlsberg made a similar discovery, uncovering bottles of its own beer dating back to 1883. In 2016 Carlsberg was able to extract active yeast from one the found bottles which allowed the brewery to take “Jurassic Park” like steps and actually recreate the original beer.
Back in 2014, Belgian scientists and a Finnish brewery re-created a mid-19th century beer from samples salvaged from a shipwreck in the Baltic.
And just last month road workers completing a £1.5 billion upgrade in the UK stumbled across what archaeologists believe to be the earliest evidence of beer ever uncovered in Britain, dating back to 400 BC.
