Where to look for a bottle of beer? There are several possible options like shelve in a local shop, fridge, or a restaurant table. But, perhaps rather unexpectedly, you can also have one chance per million and find an empty bottle of ancient beer in a tree root system. It might sound unrealistic, but we found it during fieldwork in the Sudety Mountains, SW Poland. The bottle was tightly overgrown by roots and covered by soil particles (see photos below). It is essential to mention that the bottle has German inscriptions and seems to be very old. And how to explain a German bottle in the Polish part of the Sudety Mountains covered by roots and soil? The label on the bottle says: Brauerei E. Haase Breslau. If you google this name, you learn that Eduard Haase was an owner of a brewery in Wrocław (in German known as Breslau) established in 1858. Breslau (Wrocław) was a German city before the 2nd World War, the famous city described in a book entitled “Microcosm” written by Norman Davis. Wrocław is only 100 kilometers from the place where the bottle was found (Kamienne Mountains, part of the Sudety Mountains). We speculate that a happy tourist who traversed a hillslope above the site of our scientific exploration, after drinking this perhaps very tasteful beer on a hot day, decided to get rid of unnecessary ballast and thrown the bottle away down the slope. The bottle stayed there at least 70 years and in the 21st century was rediscovered by curious geomorphologists.
