Lake of the Woods Brewing Company in Kenora, Ontario, has sunken treasure in the form of 3,300 bottles of beer. Last month, seven cages of Belgian tripels were placed to rest and the brews will stay below the surface, 20 ft. down, until late spring next year.

“It really is a big experiment,” said Rob Dokuchie, the company’s marketing director.

When the crates are retrieved next May, they’ll have aged alcohol to distribute to Manitobans and Ontarians. A 750 mL container will cost $49.95.

The idea came to Dokuchie a couple years ago when he heard of a South African brewer doing the same thing, except in the ocean.

The water’s temperature is roughly 10 C. It drops to about 4 C in the winter before bumping back up, Dokuchie said.

“The fact that (the beer) ages at that temperature lends itself well for us to be able to put it under the lake, just to see what happens,” he said.

It takes a crane, a barge, a diver and roughly a day’s work to submerge the bottles. It takes just as long to reattach cables to crates, retrieve the goods and haul them back into town via truck. Within three days, the drinks had sold out.

“We were flabbergasted that it sold so fast,” Dokuchie said. “We had so many people contacting us, asking us if they could get some.”

The waiting list for the next batch grew to roughly 700 people.  The bottles will be available for consumption by next June. Two thousand will be available in Ontario while the remaining 1,300 can be picked up at Lake of the Woods Brewing Company’s Hargrave Street Market location.

“We’re hoping, moving forward, to do a different style every year,” Dokuchie said.

The company kept bottles from their first Deep 6 round in a brewery cooler. The underwater drafts tasted different than those untouched.

“The (underwater) beer seemed a little smoother, had a little more body to it,” Dokuchie said, adding he believes they aged more due to temperature changes.

Photos courtesy of Tom Thomson and Lake of the Woods brewing company