Key points: Beer brewers yeasts found in bottles from 1797 shipwreck in Bass Strait 
 
 Scientists revive yeasts from samples found in bottles 
 
 Old English ale brewed using revived yeasts from samples, called Preservation Ale 
 
 Upon reaching the Great Southern Land in 1797, the Sydney Cove — one of the first commercial trading ships to ever attempt the journey to the newly formed colony of Sydney — sprang a leak and ran aground on tiny Preservation Island in Bass Strait. Some of the bottles survived for centuries at the bottom of the sea until they were retrieved in the early 1990s, according to a statement from the Queen Victoria Museum in Tasmania. When chemist-turned-conservator David Thurrowgood found the beer bottles in the museum's storage area when he began working at the museum 18 months ago, he was surprised to find one still had liquid inside. "Possibly the wreck has now also given us the world's only known pre-industrial revolution brewing yeast," he said in the statement. In addition to the unopened bottle, two samples from another bottle which had been carefully decanted at the time of the wreck's salvage, were found in separate parts of the museum. Image: Australian National Shipwreck Database 
 
 Anthony Borneman, principal research scientist at the Australian Wine Research Institute, became involved with the project after Thurrowgood reached out with his idea to look in the bottles for living organisms. The museum announced this week that it has recovered live yeast from a 220-year-old bottle of beer, making it possibly the oldest surviving yeast in existence. "The liquid that was in that bottle wasn't actually beer," said Professor Alan Cooper, the director for the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. Two samples did, and it turned out they came from the one bottle of beer that had been pulled intact from the Sydney Cove wreck. "The yeast is an unusual three-way hybrid with links to bakers, brewers and wine yeast," museum conservator David Thurrowgood said in a news release. Yeast are essentially tiny organisms that consume sugar and output alcohol during the brewing process, and some yeast can remain in the beer after brewing in either a living, dead or suspended state. "They all fall on the family tree with beer yeast ... Our two conflicting ideas are that they really are from the beer, or that we had a very rare, specific containment effect." Scientists divided over yeast 
 
 Professor Cooper does not believe contamination of the sample can be ruled out without clean room evidence. Researchers used an 18th-century recipe and live yeast cultured from the recovered bottles to create a batch of their own beer, which they called Preservation Ale.
– One sip of Preservation Ale and you'll be transported to a time long past—kind of. Researchers at an Australian museum have brewed what might be the "world's oldest beer," using yeast salvaged from a bottle that spent nearly two centuries on the seafloor, they say in a press release. The bottle came from the Sydney Cove, which sank off the Australian mainland in 1790 and was salvaged in the 1990s, reports CTV News. Samples of the beer were decanted at the time of the salvaging, and they sat mostly forgotten until David Thurrowgood began working at Tasmania's Queen Victoria Museum a year-and-a-half ago. He and his team say they were able to isolate live yeast in the old beer, one they say is genetically distinct from more modern yeast species. "I thought we might be able to culture that yeast and recreate beer that hasn't been on the planet for 220 years," he tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The result, brewed in accordance with an 18th-century recipe, is Preservation Ale. The discovery isn't a slam dunk: Some scientists are skeptical that yeast could live that long and suggest it might have been contaminated, perhaps in the last 20 years or so after the bottle was decanted. Researchers hope to disprove the naysayers by retrieving more bottles from the wreck and repeating the results. So how does the new-old beer taste? It has a "distinctly light and fresh flavor," say the researchers. "I f I was trying to craft beer at a pub, I'd be very happy with it," one tells Mashable. (Elsewhere, the "Everest of shipwrecks" is in bad shape.)