The dark glass bottle was one of dozens strewn around the sunken ship when the divers spotted it. Unlike many others, though, its seal was intact, and up on the surface, they could make out the words: “Guinness Extra Stout, London.”
The antique ale is thought to be 162 years old.
The team discovered the bottle while diving a shipwreck in the English Channel last year but waited to publicize the find more extensively while they conducted research, including contacting the company itself. They hope, with the help of a lab at KU Leuven, a university in Belgium, there’s a chance the historical draft could even be re-created.
“It is quite rare to find something with a seal on it,” said Stefan Panis, one of the divers. “We are very, very excited to see what the test will reveal.”
A bell found at the site indicates that the wreck is a ship called the Mindoro, which set sail for Vancouver from London on Nov. 20, 1864. A week later, navigating through a treacherous part of the English Channel, it collided with another ship and sank to the bottom of the ocean, where its contents sat in cold and dark conditions — ideal for preserving a bottle of beer, like the back of a fridge.
If the bottle managed to keep out the seawater, there is a chance the Guinness might still be sippable — the alcohol would have prevented things from growing inside, said Kevin Verstrepen, who runs a lab at KU Leuven that studies yeast and fermentation.
But the Guinness brewed at the time might not have been quite as palatable as modern brews.
“In the old days, brewers were not as good working sterilely. Probably, from a microbial point of view, it was a bit of a zoo there,” Verstrepen said, which means the beer could have sour or funky flavors.
Additionally, Guinness made in that period would not have been carbonated by nitrogen, which was introduced in the 1960s and gives the beer its smooth texture and creamy head.
The company has been based in Dublin since 1759. But there is also evidence that at least some Guinness was bottled in London in the mid-19th century.
Diageo, the British alcohol conglomerate that now owns Guinness, did not respond to a request for comment. The company previously told the Irish Times that it was evaluatingthe find.
There is probably more Guinness to be discovered in the wreck. While the one recovered bottle was found out in the open, the divers also found wooden crates packed with bottles and stored upside-down. They also plan to examine records that they think will contain the ship’s manifest.
The divers plan to go back in two weeks to recover four additional bottles, two for the Verstrepen lab and two for the company, Panis said.
It’s unlikely that the lab will be able directly recover original yeast, Verstrepen said, because beer yeast does not have a long lifespan after bottling. However, he thinks they can find traces of yeast DNA in the hopes of finding a close living relative to re-create the brew.
“With sequencing the DNA … we can see exactly where it is on this family tree, and then we can look for modern living siblings of that yeast,” he said.
As rare as the find is, one of Panis’s partners, Pawel Truszynski, had experience in unearthing antique alcohol before. Truszynski was part of another team that in 2024 discovered a 19th-century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea laden with 100 sealed bottles of champagne.
In 2014, a different group of researchers recovered a 200-year-old bottle of distilled spirit from a shipwreck off the coast of Poland.
And a small brewery in Sunderland, England, at one point sold a porter made with yeast cultured from old bottles found in a different shipwreck in the English Channel, that one from 1825.
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