Can a 39-Year-Old Bottle of Peoples Beer Still Hit The Spot?

A month ago, I posted this about a 39-year-old case of Peoples Beer that I bought from a Milwaukee couple. As I mentioned then, the bottles were still full of beer and before I had the case in hand I was thinking about drinking a couple of them. I just wanted to know what the beer was like. But when I saw what was inside those little, 7 oz bottles I had second thoughts. Even through the thick, brown glass you could see that the beer had turned cloudy and dark. And at the bottom of each bottle was a nest of gelatinous slime. I changed my mind.

So for the next few weeks I lived with this case of beer. Hardly a day went by that I didn’t pluck one out of the case and look it over. The more I looked the more the urge to drink some of this stuff asserted itself. After a while, it was as if the beer was taunting me. Beer is not meant to be bottled up and stared at. It’s made to drink! Of course, I finally gave in and drank one of them.

Here, then, are probably the oddest tasting notes I’ve ever made: Upon opening the bottle, you can hear the last of its tired carbonation wheeze out. The beer pours a turbid amber with the aroma of black mold and musty water. It reaches the palate Dead on Arrival; utterly flat and with a nasty, viscous quality similar to what you get eating battered fish seared in over-used frying oil. The taste isn’t as bad as you’d expect. The flavor is somewhere in the vicinity of cooking sherry spiked with vinegar. If Old Speckled Hen were brewed by the people who make Cobra Malt Liquor, it might taste something like this.

The worst of it, though, came about 25 minutes after I’d finished. And yes, I did finish it. It was as if a couple of mice had been let loose in my stomach and were trying to claw their way out. I’m not going to be vulgar about it, let’s just say that for the next 12 hours I didn’t leave the house. The thing about all this is that even though I swore I’d never drink another one of these, I’m already starting to waver. What if that was just a bad bottle? There’s only going to be one way to find out.