Brewer ferments beer on seabed

A small Scottish brewing company has fermented a beer at the bottom of the sea.

One of the ‘new wave’ of microbreweries, BrewDog was founded in 2006 in Fraserburgh near Aberdeen.

Company owners Martin Dickie and James Watt have previously come up with a left-field range of ales including ‘Trashy Blond’, ’5am Saint’ and ‘Punk IPA’.

But their latest experiment is called ‘Sunk Punk’, a 7.1% IPA fermented at the bottom of the North Sea (well, about 20 metres down.)

The nautical theme continues inside the bottle, thanks to buckweed and distilled sea salt in the ingredients. Oh, and mermaids, apparently.

‘Sunk Punk’ supposedly came about because according to local legend, a fisherman would go fishing every day and come home empty handed. It turns out that he was drinking beer instead of fishing, so his ‘witch’ of a wife put a spell on the sea, and the only way to undo the spell is to brew beer on the sea floor… or some guff like that anyway.

In any event, the BrewDog team specially modified casks with a non-return valve, to allow the CO2 from fermentation to escape. The barrels sat fastened to the seabed, with a Jolly Roger flag attached, for two weeks.

The resulting beer is not cheap: you can order a 330ml bottle of Sunk Punk for just under a tenner from the BrewDog website. But how many other beers contain mermaids…