Beer enthusiasts may soon have a taste of a 170-year-old brew as the Stallhagen Brewery will be reproducing beer based on a century-old recipe. Original contents of two preserved beer samples have been analysed by the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Technical University of Munich. The beer bottles were recovered together with bottles of champagne from the 1840s shipwreck discovered near the Åland Islands in 2010.

Brian Gibson and associates were able to conduct exhaustive analyses of the original beer ingredients and to isolate what is probably the oldest living lactic acid bacteria found in beer. Annika Wilhelmson from VTT explained that these living non-spore forming bacteria may have thrived together with the yeast due to the brewing processes used during the 1840s. These microbes played an important role in brewing the beer replicas.

When the research team had their taste tests of the beer samples, they noticed vinegary aroma and flavours different from that of beer. The living bacteria may have produced high concentrations of acid that gave the beverage a sour taste, which obscured the beers’ malt or hop features. Nevertheless, the researchers’ analyses made it possible to determine the original composition of the samples. Also, they were able to differentiate the hop contents of the two beer samples and found that the flavour compounds derived from yeast were quite the same to that of modern beer.

Findings on this VTT study were published in the ACS' Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry. These also became the bases for the brewing technique and creation of the production process. Research on beer and brewery is one of VTT’s areas of expertise for many years. Funding for this research was granted by the Stallhagen Brewery and the Regional Government of Åland. The Belgian university, KU Leuven, contributed to the development of the brewing system.

The VTT scientists and the University of Saskatchewan are conducting further studies on the lactic acid bacteria found in the beer bottles to find out how these microorganisms managed to survive for more than 170 years. These strains could be useful in manufacturing other food and beverages some day.

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