Beer keg lost in a South Tyrol glacier in 1978 found, still full
A mountain runner in South Tyrol has pulled a full 1978 beer keg out of a glacier crevasse. It fell from a helicopter decades ago, and the beer is still good.
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giftdetect· the right gift in minutesA beer keg that fell off a helicopter in the late 1970s has turned up in a glacier crevasse in South Tyrol, Italy, still full. And according to the people who tasted it, still good.
The finder is Daniel Oberlechner, a 42-year-old mountain runner. The keg, which weighs around 40 kilos, was being flown up to a mountain hut in the Ahrn valley. During the flight it slipped out of the net holding the load and dropped into a crack in the glacier. That happened somewhere between the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, and nobody had seen it since.
Oberlechner knew the story. A neighbour who used to run the mountain hut had told him about it, and ever since he had scanned the ground on his runs for any trace of the lost keg.
How was the 1978 beer keg found?
In 2026, a storm uncovered it. The year 1978 was written on the metal itself, so the keg is older than the man who found it.
Getting it down was the hard part. Oberlechner loaded the 40-kilo keg onto a transport cart and wheeled it over ice and scree to the valley floor.
Was the beer still drinkable?
It was opened at a tasting with friends and colleagues. One of them was his boss, who works in drinks distribution and examined the contents too. His verdict: it tastes good. The beer is amber and carbonated.
He has a theory for why it survived. The keg apparently never froze inside the crevasse. Ice would have expanded and deformed the metal, and a damaged keg would not have kept its contents. That is his opinion, not a lab result, but it fits the keg coming out intact.
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