Aqua Regia

Tasting Notes

Peach-orange and autumnally hued, Aqua Regia is a rich, luxurious barleywine of English persuasion. Deep, gingerbread malt tones underlay a vibrant fabric of bright orchard fruits, spiced orange peel, and vanilla pralines with a long, lingering finish punctuated by flourishes of Tellicherry black peppercorns and rose water. A decadent treat to larder away before the onslaught of winter.

Secret ALCAMY

A potent mixture of three parts hydrochloric to one part nitric acid, aqua regia is most notably a solution with the rare ability to dissolve gold - a peculiar attribute utilized by Niels Bohr and Georgy de Hevesy to hide two Nobel Peace prizes awarded to Jewish and Nazi dissenting scientists. Snuck out of Germany at the onset of the war, the medals were held at the Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Denmark for safe keeping. In 1940, Nazi troops marched on Denmark. Vastly out-equipped and out-numbered, the Danish government feared the Germans would bomb Copenhagen as they did Warsaw and the country fell within six hours of the onset of the ground invasion. With enemy soldiers suddenly in the streets, Bohr and de Hevesy had a matter of minutes to hide the easily identifiable medals. Quickly ruling out burying them on the grounds, they instead cleverly dissolved the gold medals in a beaker of aqua regia and hid the resultant peach-orange liquid in plain sight on a high shelf in their laboratory. In 1943, de Hevesy was forced to flee as well to Stockholm but, after VE Day, returned to find the non-descript beaker undisturbed and precipitated the gold back out of the aqua regia. In 1950 the gold was returned to the Nobel Foundation where the two medals were recast and returned to Max von Laue, winner of the 1914 Prize for Physics and James Franck, winner of the 1925 Prize for Physics. Niels Bohr auctioned off his Nobel medal in 1940 to raise funds for Finnish relief efforts. It was returned afterwards to the Danish Historical Museum. In 1943, de Hevesy was awarded his own Nobel Prize for Chemistry.