Bottle of beer found in shipwreck gets homecoming after 150 years
A 150-YEAR-OLD bottle of beer discovered near a shipwreck off the coast of Australia has been returned to its brewery in Glasgow.
The bottle of stout was discovered by diver Jim Anderson close to where the ill-fated clipper The Light of The Age foundered near Melbourne in January 1868 on a voyage from Liverpool.
Mr Anderson made the discovery in the 1970s and noticed a Wellpark Brewery stamp. He eventually contacted the brewery and has now brought the bottle back to Glasgow, where it will feature in a new £1 million visitor centre built to tell the story of Tennent’s Lager.
The stout pre-dates Tennent’s Lager but was made in the Wellpark Brewery that created the famous Scottish drink.
At the time, Wellpark was the biggest exporter of bottled beer in the world and the shipwrecked bottle is thought to be one of the oldest in Britain.
Mr Anderson, 72, has travelled to Scotland with his wife Jan for the opening of the Tennent’s Visitor Centre next Thursday. He said: “I found it on a dive in the 1970s, photographed it, and put it in my basement along with other things I’d salvaged from wrecks from those days.
“It was there for years, and it wasn’t until I found the old photographs when I was looking through an old book earlier this year. I could see the inscription Wellpark Brewery on it, and I set about finding where that was. I found out it was in Glasgow, and I contacted Tennent’s to see if they were interested in the bottle, which they were, and I was delighted.”
Tennent’s bosses say the new visitor centre at its Wellpark Brewery will tell the history of brewing in the area from the 1500s through to the present day.
To mark the bottle’s homecoming, Tennent’s brewers have gone back through old recipes in order to recreate a commemorative-edition run of the stout.