The Miraculous Drink of the Dean of St Paul’s.

As Dean Nowell carefully arranged his fishing gear, he saw the bottles.

A fortnight earlier he had drawn beer from the barrels in the Deanery, placed them in the ditch to keep cool – but the fishing was so good he had forgotten them.

“I wonder if it’s any good”

He untied the cloth round the neck, pulled out the cork and tasted – nectar!

It sparkled, bubbles burst on his tongue, no one on earth had ever tasted such a wonderful drink before.

Fishing forgotten, he walked back to London, he had a new quest – how to make bottled beer.

Another true historical tale. After much experimenting the reverend Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, succeeded in achieving secondary fermentation in beer to give it the wonderful sparkle he had first tasted on the banks of the Thames. About eighty years later another English gentleman applied the same method to wine, he wrote about his experiments and a copy of his book made its way to the Champagne region of France – and then?

Written in response to this week’s Carrot Ranch prompt;

August 30, 2018, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less) write a story about a bottleneck. You can be literal or use the term to describe congestion. Go where the prompt leads.

So I have written about the neck of a bottle, if the cork hadn’t fitted it so well, the history of the world might have been different.