Antti Aimo-Koivisto/Reuters

One of five bottles found off Finland in Davy Jones' locker.

In July of last year a very important discovery was made by divers in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. Divers were searching a shipwreck near the Aland Islands believed to be from the early 19th century for bottles. They were looking for bottles of champagne, but five of the bottles later proved to be dark, foamy beer. Scientists say it's the oldest drinkable beer found ever in the history of ever. The sunken brew was contained, and now Finnish scientists say they plan on testing and analyzing it to re-brew the original recipe.

In particular, a spokeswoman for the scientists' research center says they want to determine what kind of yeast was used because "the role of yeast in beer brewing was not yet fully understood in the early 1800s."

According to BBC News the beer has actually been tasted by four professional tasters (I picked the wrong job), and "it did taste very old, which is no surprise, with some burnt notes. But it was quite acidic — which could mean there's been some fermenting going on in the bottle and with time it's become acid."

But there's some serious science in play to figure it all out. Annika Wilhelmson with the research center working on this analysis explains:

"We're going to try to see if we can find any living yeast or other microbial cells, because that would be very interesting with respect to reproducing the beer," Dr Wilhelmson explained.

"So far we have seen under microscopes that there are yeast and bacterial cells, but we don't know if they're dead or alive yet. If we can't find living microbes, we will look at the DNA and try to compare it to brewing yeasts that we know today, to see how similar or different the yeasts are."

Pinning down which hops have been used on the basis of further chemical analysis may be difficult, Dr Wilhelmson added, meaning that reviving the 200-year-old brew for modern drinkers may prove difficult.

"Whatever we analyse, we're going to have to do a lot of interpreting," she said. "We need to analyse what it is today and start thinking about what it was like when it was made - when it was fresh, becasue it clearly isn't fresh now."

Somehow this makes the bottles of Newcastle sitting in the back of my fridge far less interesting by comparison. It also makes me take that "drink by" date on the bottle a little less seriously.