A 150-year-old bottle of mystery alcohol was uncovered at Alta. What was it, and how did it taste?

Last summer, as construction crews dug a trench in Little Cottonwood Canyon to install snowmaking pipes, a backhoe set down a big scoop of dirt and a surprise rolled out: an intact 150-year-old glass bottle, stoppered with a cork and full of murky liquid.

The dark green bottle was found alongside thousands of other artifacts from the site of what was once the silver mining boomtown of Alta, which saw its heyday around the late 1800s.

It wasn’t hard to guess what was inside, according to Ian Wright, Utah’s public archaeologist: His team could easily smell alcohol emanating from its degraded cork.

To analyze what exactly it was, he asked Isaac Winter, director of distilling at High West Distillery, for help.

Winter said the bottle had held up “surprisingly” well, even though it saw “150 summers, 150 winters underneath the ground at Alta Ski Resort.”

But it was still over a century old, from sometime between 1870 and 1890, so together, he and a team handled the bottle with extreme care as they studied it and its contents.

The team included researchers from High West, Uinta Brewing Company and a Lehi laboratory called the Aromatic Plant Research Center, which tests medical cannabis and essential oils.

By testing the mystery booze, they also wanted to learn how it was made. Their biggest question: Could they replicate it in the present day?

If they found traces of living yeast that were still inside, they could try, Winter said.

Before testing began at Uinta Brewing Company last week, Winter was so excited about that possibility that he said he got “the chills every time.”

“I know it’s a long shot,” he said, “but if we were able to do that, I just think that’s so, so exciting.”

Now, the first test results are in, and Winter said they “give us an interesting look at the state of the alcohol industry in or around Utah in the late 19^th century."

What did the alcohol taste like?

When the bottle arrived at High West Saloon in Park City, Winter and his team first needed to figure out the best way to access the alcohol.

They initially tried using a Coravin needle, a “big hypodermic needle” that pierces through cork and uses inert gas to force the liquid out without exposing the rest of the bottle to oxygen.

It didn’t quite work. The cork was so worn that it couldn’t hold the pressure the needle required. So they used a tool called an osso — which is often used to open old bottles of wine — to carefully remove the cork. It came out mostly in one piece, Winter said.

Then they poured out some of the alcohol into a little glass and passed it around to give it a whiff.

“It didn’t smell like gasoline, and it didn’t smell like tobacco spit,” Winter said at a January presentation about the excavation and the history of Alta. “It actually had some interesting kind of dried fruit notes.”

After that came the tasting. “I was the guinea pig, and I got to taste it,” Winter said. “First person to taste this bottle after 150 years. It was a very cool experience, and I didn’t die.”

He said the alcohol had oxidized fruit notes akin to those in sherry, as well as raisin and honey flavors, and “some floral character.” The color was something like an amber ale, Winter said, or a dark pale ale, and the texture was like flat lager beer.

Winter said he could also tell there was sugar in it, because as the bottle was being opened, a bit sprayed on a table and left a sticky residue behind.

What did the tests find?

Winter said the “working theory” based on some of the results so far is that the alcohol is some kind of cider.

By testing the aromatic molecules that were floating just above the liquid, researchers found compounds that suggest the base sugar used to make the alcohol came from apples, Winter said.

They also found that the alcohol was about 7% alcohol by volume (ABV), which is about the same ABV as a present-day heavy beer or hard cider.

The aromatic testing suggested the alcohol had been in contact with charred oak at some point, perhaps in a barrel, but Winter said those compounds could’ve also been made by Brettanomyces, a “funky” type of wild yeast.

Brewing practices weren’t exactly sterile in the 1800s, Winter said, and myriad types of yeast could’ve contaminated the brew at some point.

But as far as finding living yeast or bacteria in the bottle, all the tests came back negative, Winter said, adding that he felt “a little bit disappointed.”

However, he said there’s still a “detailed picture” they can paint with the results they’ve collected so far, and they plan to do more tests in the future on the liquid itself.

Winter said they still want to test for sorbitol, which is a sugar alcohol that’s present in pears and some varieties of crab apples. And they want to test for malic acid, which would also indicate a fruity origin.

What do the findings mean?

The bottle’s discovery and analysis have been a “really interesting look back into the rough and tumble past of Utah’s roots as a mining town,” Winter said.

It also helps disprove the misconception that Utah doesn’t have a history of making alcoholic beverages.

Early Latter-day Saint leader Brigham Young himself had a distillery, tithing records show, Winter noted during his January presentation. In 2006, High West became the first legal distillery to open in Utah after Young closed his down in 1870.

While some aspects of the 150-year-old alcohol might remain a mystery, Winter said the bottle’s design (glass blown into a three-piece mold), along with the state of the liquid inside show that its maker was “approaching their craft with intention.”

“This bottle wasn’t some rotgut firewater but something driven by delicate aromatics,” Winter said. “It wasn’t something crude, but something meant to be enjoyed as part of community life — something to celebrate with on the edge of civilization beneath the towering peaks of Alta.”

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