What does the world's oldest-known beer recipe taste like? 
 
 It's actually surprisingly "light and fresh," according to researchers at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Australia. 
 
 The museum announced this week that it has recovered live yeast from a 220-year-old bottle of beer, making it possibly the oldest surviving yeast in existence. The bottle is thought to be a sort of chemical time capsule, capable of offering researchers a taste of the way people used to drink. 
 
 "The yeast is an unusual three-way hybrid with links to bakers, brewers and wine yeast," museum conservator David Thurrowgood said in a news release. "It is genetically different to hundreds of yeast species it has been compared to from Australia and around the world." 
 
 Researchers used an 18th-century recipe and live yeast cultured from the recovered bottles to create a batch of their own beer, which they called Preservation Ale. The museum analyzed and cultured the yeast with the help of the Australian Wine Research Institute and the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. 
 
 It’s the first time brewing yeast of this age has been observed in a live condition, the museum says. 
 
 Yeast is an essential ingredient for brewing beer, and the choice of yeast can have a significant impact on the colour and flavour of the final product. Yeast are essentially tiny organisms that consume sugar and output alcohol during the brewing process, and some yeast can remain in the beer after brewing in either a living, dead or suspended state. Modern pasteurization processes kill off the yeast, but older beers – like, say, a brew from the late 18th century – were made without this sanitary measure. 
 
 The museum says it's now seeking funding to study the yeast further, and to explore the possibility of re-creating other historic brews. "Possibly the wreck has now also given us the world's only known pre-industrial revolution brewing yeast," Thurrowgood said. 
 
 The bottle was recovered from the wreck of the Sydney Cove, a small trading ship that sank off the coast of Australia in 1797, with a cargo hold full of goods from Calcutta. Divers excavated the shipwreck from 1991-1994, and recovered the bottle of beer along with many other well-preserved trade goods, including tobacco, ink, textiles, wine and spirits. The museum says the shipwreck is well-known for its "range of preserved fragile organic materials," which rarely survive in other centuries-old wrecks. 
 
 The red wine recovered from the wreck could also offer insight into what micro-organisms were present in people's diets 220 years ago, according to the release. ||||| World's oldest beer brought back to life, scientists claim 
 
 Updated 
 
 A group of Australian scientists claim they have pulled off a world first by reviving the yeast of a 220-year-old beer salvaged from a shipwreck. 
 
 Key points: Beer brewers yeasts found in bottles from 1797 shipwreck in Bass Strait 
 
 Scientists revive yeasts from samples found in bottles 
 
 Old English ale brewed using revived yeasts from samples, called Preservation Ale 
 
 Upon reaching the Great Southern Land in 1797, the Sydney Cove — one of the first commercial trading ships to ever attempt the journey to the newly formed colony of Sydney — sprang a leak and ran aground on tiny Preservation Island in Bass Strait. 
 
 Many of the crew were rescued by longboat but some of the cargo remained buried at sea in the sunken ship, including some of Sydney's precious beer supply. 
 
 For a quart of Ale is a dish for a king. William Shakespeare 
 
 For almost two centuries the beer sat forgotten, sealed beneath a layer of sand and seagrass, conditions that preserved the organic material unusually well until it was salvaged in 1990. 
 
 "It virtually sealed everything in, there was no oxygen getting in and it was completely intact," said marine archaeologist Mike Nash, who salvaged the wreck. 
 
 Treasures from the wreck are the star attraction at the Queen Victoria museum in Launceston in Tasmania's north. 
 
 When chemist-turned-conservator David Thurrowgood found the beer bottles in the museum's storage area when he began working at the museum 18 months ago, he was surprised to find one still had liquid inside. 
 
 It sparked a wild imagining — could there be real yeast in there? 
 
 "At that point I was getting really excited," Mr Thurrowgood told Catalyst. 
 
 "That gave us a chance to possibly have access to the oldest beer in the world. I thought we might be able to culture that yeast and recreate beer that hasn't been on the planet for 220 years." 
 
 In addition to the unopened bottle, two samples from another bottle which had been carefully decanted at the time of the wreck's salvage, were found in separate parts of the museum. 
 
 Bringing the beer back to life 
 
 Brimming with optimism, in November 2015 the conservator contacted several top scientists and got an abrupt reality check. 
 
 "I didn't think there was any chance it was ever going to work," said yeast specialist Anthony Borneman, from the Australian Wine Research Institute. 
 
 "But the opportunity was too good to pass up, to not try. I couldn't bear it if we said no and someone else tried it and it worked." 
 
 No-one in the world has ever reliably recovered live yeast from a beer bottle 220 years old, and some experts doubt beer yeasts survive longer than 10 years. 
 
 Despite this, a syringe sample from the one precious unopened bottle was taken in a highly sterilised room. 
 
 But the hopes of Dr Borneman and colleague Simon Dillon faded when the sample returned no results. 
 
 "The liquid that was in that bottle wasn't actually beer," said Professor Alan Cooper, the director for the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. 
 
 "Maybe castor oil, maybe something else, but not beer." 
 
 But the two samples from the Tasmanian wreck that were decanted 20 years ago did come to life. 
 
 "My first reaction, and I think Simon's too, was, 'do it again'," Dr Borneman said. 
 
 "So that was the first thing we did, we repeated it to make sure that the same two grew if we tried to culture them again. 
 
 "And then I think after the second time, the reaction was, 'do it again'." 
 
 A detailed DNA analysis of the yeasts was undertaken to find out if the yeasts were present because of contamination. 
 
 The brewer's yeast brettanomyces was found. It is not used in modern commercial brewing, but was used everywhere in old-style brewing. 
 
 Also present was the brewer's yeast Saccharomyces, but not like it had ever been seen before. The yeast was a hybrid that sat closest on the family tree to Trappist ale, made by monks in Belgium. 
 
 Scientists divided over yeast 
 
 Professor Cooper does not believe contamination of the sample can be ruled out without clean room evidence. 
 
 "The problem is we've got a 20-year black hole between when the bottle was originally opened, decanted, then moved," he told Catalyst. 
 
 "Somewhere in that 20-year window anything could have happened." 
 
 But Dr Borneman and Mr Thurrowgood struggle with the hypothesis that it was contamination. 
 
 "We think we've got a yeast that hasn't been seen for at least 220 years," Mr Thurrowgood said. 
 
 Dr Borneman said there were too many coincidences for it to be a contamination. 
 
 "We've got two samples, the same bottle, both decanted and then kept apart," he said. 
 
 "So either there was a very specific contamination event 20 years ago when they decanted it into the two samples, both samples got equally contaminated with our hybrid Saccharomyces strain and our beer-brewing Brettanomyces strains … then they were locked away for 20 years and both stayed viable. Or, the strains were in the bottle." 
 
 They all agree they need to go back to the wreck, dig deeper, salvage more bottles, and send them straight to the lab. 
 
 In the meantime, a homebrew using the yeast has been made based on a common English ale recipe. 
 
 The beer has been named Preservation Ale by Mr Thurrowgood, after Preservation Island, and is quite possibly a revival of the world's oldest beer. 
 
 Watch how the story of adventure, misadventure, salvage, and science unfolded on Catalyst tonight at 8pm on ABC TV. 
 
 Topics: history, beverages, science-and-technology, tas 
 
 First posted ||||| Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016. These files are currently not publicly accessible. Properties of this collection. It has been several years since the last time we did this. For this collection, several things were done: 1. Turned off duplicate detection. This collection will be complete, as there is a good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random other collections, is a complex problem. 2. For the first time, did all the different wikis. The original runs were just against the enwiki. This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections. ||||| Would you drink beer resurrected from the remnants of a 220-year-old bottle? Thanks to some enterprising Australian scientists, you may have the chance to find out. 
 
 In 1797, a small merchant vessel went down off the coast of Tasmania, Australia, in the treacherous Bass Strait. Known as the Sydney Cove shipwreck, the ship was travelling from Calcutta, now Kolkata, India, to Port Jackson, Australia, with a cargo of food, textiles and livestock. 
 
 It also had plenty of beer on board. Some of the bottles survived for centuries at the bottom of the sea until they were retrieved in the early 1990s, according to a statement from the Queen Victoria Museum in Tasmania. David Thurrowgood, a conservator at the museum, which also hosts an exhibit about the wreck, decided he would find out if the remains of one salvaged bottle could be turned into a fresh brew. 
 
 Thurrowgood, along with a number of scientists, now believe they have taken live yeast from a surviving beer bottle and turned it into a brand new batch. 
 
 "Possibly the wreck has now also given us the world's only known pre-industrial revolution brewing yeast," he said in the statement. 
 
 Bottles being retrieved from the Sydney Cove wreck. Image: Australian National Shipwreck Database 
 
 Anthony Borneman, principal research scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute, became involved with the project after Thurrowgood reached out with his idea to look in the bottles for living organisms. 
 
 "When we started, we were pretty skeptical we'd be able to grow anything live," he told Mashable Australia. 
 
 They took samples from a number of bottles and placed them in nutrient broth to see if anything would grow. Two samples did, and it turned out they came from the one bottle of beer that had been pulled intact from the Sydney Cove wreck. There were other whole bottles, but they were found to contain wine and other liquids. 
 
 Unfortunately, the team can't say with complete certainty the yeast came directly from the old beer and is not instead an unusual contaminant effect. After being taken from the wreck, the bottle was decanted into two different samples for fear the cork would deteriorate. 
 
 Nevertheless, it's the answer that would make the most sense. "The yeast that we pulled out, and there were a few different species, are all involved with beer brewing," he explained. "They all fall on the family tree with beer yeast ... Our two conflicting ideas are that they really are from the beer, or that we had a very rare, specific containment effect." 
 
 Porcelain found in the wreck. Image: Australian National Shipwreck Database 
 
 According to Borneman, the resulting beer that was made — lager and ale — tasted pretty good despite the spectacularly old age of the yeast. 
 
 "These are all done at home brew level — it can be pretty hit and miss — but these home brews were very clear," he added. "If I was trying to craft beer at a pub, I'd be very happy with it." 
 
 To his knowledge, if the yeast is in fact from the original beer, it would make their yeast the oldest living that has been used in a successful brew. In May, the Carlsberg Research Laboratory announced it had made a lager from yeast found in a bottle that had survived 133 years in its cellar. 
 
 The team now hope to raise funds to go back down to the Sydney Cove wreck and retrieve any remaining bottles and artefacts. If they find any, their contents will be removed in a clean room to prove once and for all whether the yeast is genuine. 
 
 Borneman also has plans to make beer from bottles found in other wrecks around Australia. Forget craft beer — you'll now need shipwreck beer for something truly authentic. 
 
 Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
– One sip of Preservation Ale and you'll be transported to a time long past—kind of. Researchers at an Australian museum have brewed what might be the "world's oldest beer," using yeast salvaged from a bottle that spent nearly two centuries on the seafloor, they say in a press release. The bottle came from the Sydney Cove, which sank off the Australian mainland in 1790 and was salvaged in the 1990s, reports CTV News. Samples of the beer were decanted at the time of the salvaging, and they sat mostly forgotten until David Thurrowgood began working at Tasmania's Queen Victoria Museum a year-and-a-half ago. He and his team say they were able to isolate live yeast in the old beer, one they say is genetically distinct from more modern yeast species. "I thought we might be able to culture that yeast and recreate beer that hasn't been on the planet for 220 years," he tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The result, brewed in accordance with an 18th-century recipe, is Preservation Ale. The discovery isn't a slam dunk: Some scientists are skeptical that yeast could live that long and suggest it might have been contaminated, perhaps in the last 20 years or so after the bottle was decanted. Researchers hope to disprove the naysayers by retrieving more bottles from the wreck and repeating the results. So how does the new-old beer taste? It has a "distinctly light and fresh flavor," say the researchers. "I f I was trying to craft beer at a pub, I'd be very happy with it," one tells Mashable. (Elsewhere, the "Everest of shipwrecks" is in bad shape.)