When we ate dinner at the Ed Sullivan Theater years ago, they had a beer called Flag Porter whose claim to fame was that the yeast was retrieved from a sunken ship. We also met Paul Shaffer from the Letterman show who was somehow involved in the restaurant.
Researched and devised by Dr Keith Thomas at the Brewers’ Laboratory (Brewlab) in London, Flag Porter is a historical recreation of a porter beer from the 19th century. In 1988 deep-sea divers from the City of London Polytechnic were investigating the wreck of a ship that had sunk in the English Channel in 1825. The divers found bottles of porter onboard the wreck, brought several to the surface, and gave them to Dr Thomas, who found that although the beer had been contaminated by seawater and was undrinkable, some original yeast was still alive inside the bottles. He was able to isolate a few living yeast cells from one bottle and culture them in his laboratory until he had a sufficient amount of yeast to make a batch of beer. The first brew took place in 1988 at the Pitfield Brewery in Hoxton, London, since when the beer has been brewed regularly, mostly for sale in the United States. https://www.beerandbrewing.com/dictionary/5JrFR84NZR
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u/DadJokeBadJoke 5h ago
When we ate dinner at the Ed Sullivan Theater years ago, they had a beer called Flag Porter whose claim to fame was that the yeast was retrieved from a sunken ship. We also met Paul Shaffer from the Letterman show who was somehow involved in the restaurant.