Austrian brewery revives 300-year-old beer

A family-owned brewery in Austria is offering beer-lovers a step back in time after recreating a 300-year-old beer recipe found in local archives.

Reuters reported that the Hofstetten Brewery, found in the Austrian town of Saint Martin, has revived the “Neuhauser Herrschafts Pier”. The recipe came from ingredients that were listed on an invoice for the nearby Neuhaus castle, which dated back to 1720.

Despite having all the ingredients brewery owner Peter Krammer admitted that it took five attempts before he was satisfied with the beer. “We thought that old kinds of grains must have more taste,” he told Reuters.

Krammer used small crops of emmer and malting barley that were grown from ancient seed varieties preserved by agricultural historians.

The new beer only breaks with tradition by using an old-style French yeast, which was taken from a rural brewery. Rather than using yeast, the original Austrian brewers used remnants of the previous batch of beer to help the fermentation process.

The Hofstetten Brewery is one of the oldest in Austria, and brewed just one 4,000-litre batch of the old beer which, Reuters reported, “tastes like wheat beer”, it was served this month at Saint Martin’s volunteer-firefighter festival.