Sometime back in the '60s or '70s a distant cousin or uncle of Jay's ex-wife Lucy was moving from Scotland to the U.S. He had heard how bad American beer was, so decided he would make his own when he got here. Before he left Scotland, he bought a bunch of homebrewing ingredients. After he got here, for whatever reason he never made any beer.
Well, the relative passed away in 1998. Upon cleaning out his residence, someone stumbled across all the old homebrewing stuff. Knowing that Jay was a homebrewer, he ended up with all the old stuff. He brought it to the meeting in November 1998 and tried to give it away. Naturally, no one wanted 25-year-old ingredients. The hop leaves were so dry you could see through them, and so brittle they turned to powder at the slightest touch. The cans of extract were bulging. I just knew they were going to explode all over the house! And don't you know that dried yeast was just raring to go after nearly 10,000 days of hibernation.
As the meeting wore on and more and more beers were consumed, someone said, "We ought to have a brewing session with all this old stuff!" Everyone else, being in such a clear-minded state, said, "Hell, yes! Let's do it!" So we actually brewed those old ingredients right then at the meeting. We had to add some fresher yeast to get it going, but it did ferment. It ended up being about 4 gallons. A few weeks later most of it went into one of Scott Storey's kegs. The rest went into a dozen bottles or so, which we still have.
In honor of the ingredients being from the '70s, we called it "That '70s Beer".
"How does it taste," you ask? Even worse than you would have thought. When it was made you could tell it was going to be pretty thin. At a meeting a couple of months after brewing, we tasted what was in Scott's keg. It was horrible. So bad that after the meeting, Scott poured it out. We still have the bottles and every few months we open one to see if it has gotten any better with age. To this point it has not. (The last bottle was opened in 2003 I think.) So here's a tip: don't pre-age your brewing ingredients. Save the aging until after the brewing!
Here's Jay working his magic on That 70s Beer. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble!