A diver found 162-year-old Guinness, still sealed and drinkable

A Belgian photographer named Stefan Panis pulled a 162-year-old bottle of Guinness from a shipwreck in the English Channel, sealed and intact after more than a century underwater. Panis found it while diving the wreck of The Mindoro, a cargo ship that left London for Vancouver Island in 1864 before it collided with another vessel and sank. The beer survived because of physics, not luck. Brewing historian Edward Bourke explained that bottles that settle upside down trap an air bubble, which creates a pressurized barrier blocking seawater from seeping past the cork. Upright bottles do not make it. Panis and his colleagues sent the find to a microbiologist specialising in beer at KU Leuven University in Belgium, who wants to study its yeast strains, some of which may now be extinct. Panis believes a full case still rests in the wreck. Guinness experts told him much of it may still be drinkable.