A 150-year-old bottle of alcohol may no longer be a mystery, as researchers now believe it contains alcoholic apple cider.
The bottle, produced between 1870 and 1890, was found this past summer at an archaeological site in Alta, Utah, a former mining town turned ski resort.
Ian Wright, an archaeologist with the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, shared his excitement on Facebook:
“Utah’s Wild West in a bottle! A rare 150-year-old full bottle of alcohol was unearthed in Alta - the only intact historic spirit found in a Utah archaeological site - and local preservationists and distillers are exploring what it can teach us about life in the past.”
Wright later spoke with a local newspaper, where he emphasized the rarity of the artifact.
“We rarely find a bottle with a cork at all. Or if we do find one, the corks shriveled up and shrunk inside of it.
“This bottle just kind of rolled down the hill. When they picked it up, it was still full. It still had a cork in it. We realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a real treasure,’” said Wright.
Analysis of the bottle's contents
The bottle was later delivered to High West Distillery in Park City, which, when it was founded in 2006, became the first legal distillery in Utah since the 1870s.
Experts began investigating the liquid in the container, taking a sip of it.
According to Fox 13, Tara Lindly, director of sensory and product development at High West, described her initial scent as an “oxidized fruit note.”
Isaac Winter, head of distilling at High West, reinforced Lindly’s sentiments and found the drink to be “fruity.”
“It tastes sort of like a Fino Sherry, like there’s some kind of oxidized fruit notes, some raisins, some honey notes, but it’s low ABV,” Winter said.
He continues: "There's a little bit of leather. There's quite a bit of age on it."
Recent lab results of the liquid suggest an apple cider. Though researchers say the results are not fully conclusive, Winter described them as “really exciting” during an interview with Fox 13.
"We saw a couple of esters [organic compounds] that would suggest the base was apples," he said.
The liquid will now undergo a series of tests at a third-party lab to verify whether the bottle contains apple-specific compounds, such as malic acid, and to determine the drink's alcohol content.
Once further tests are undergone, the High West Distillery team is looking to replicate the drink, and is "exploring different options to work with labs on plating this out."
"There's probably a whole mess of different microbes in there - bacteria, yeast.
"We need it to, you know, be able to eat sugar and create alcohol and CO2. We also want it to taste good at the end of the day," Winter said.