Ever wanted to taste a beer from the 1880s? Now you can—well, a recreation of it, at least.

Beer experts from Oregon State University have brewed a batch of Christian Heurich Brewing Company’s Senate Lager after a researcher discovered the recipe in the National Archives.

The beer was the brainchild of Christian Heurich, a German immigrant who founded Heurich Brewing in 1872. He grew the business into the largest brewery in D.C., as well as the city’s largest non-governmental employer. The brewery even managed to survive Prohibition, unlike most other local breweries and distilleries, and had a massive factory where the Kennedy Center now stands.

The brewery’s legacy has been kept alive by the staff at Heurich House, a museum near Dupont Circle based out of the brewmaster’s original brownstone mansion. Due to a 1938 fire that consumed the brewery’s archives, however, most of Heurich’s recipes have remained a mystery.

That is, until a local homebrewer and historian named Pete Jones came across a curious file in the National Archives. It was a Korean War-era appeal by Heurich’s son, Christian Heurich, Jr., asking for an increase in tin rations to use for canning beer. The appeal contained lab reports from the late 1940s detailing the recipe and brewing process for Senate Lager, one of the brewery’s flagship beers.

“As soon as he saw [the file], he knew he had something,” said Kim Bender, Heurich House’s executive director.

Bender told the brewers at Oregon State University’s Fermentation Science Department about the discovery, and they signed on to help. They looked at the documentation to find the alcohol and sugar contents of the beer and the type of hops and malted barley it used. They were able to closely mimic the recipe, with a few necessary adjustments — the malted barley used in the 1940s is no longer on the market, for one, so they worked with a malting company to come up with a suitable alternative. They ended up brewing two variations with different strains of yeast.

Senate’s flavor profile is typical of a beer from the 1940s: a classic American lager, but with a hint more bitterness than today’s varieties. It’s a light, highly drinkable beer with a 5% alcohol level, according to Jeff Clawson, one of the brewers at Oregon State who worked on the project. That means it’s probably not a great fit for the city’s hordes of IPA-loving millennials.

“This would be something more like great-grandpa’s beer,” Clawson said.

Senate Beer has a long history of success in Washington. The brand was trademarked in 1896, and it won numerous first and second place awards during the early 1900s. Beer production went on hiatus during Prohibition, but Senate was one of the first D.C. beers to come back on the market after Prohibition ended. Heurich Brewing shut down in 1956.

Senate isn’t the only Heurich beer to make a modern reappearance. In 2013, Heurich House partnered with DC Brau to recreate Heurich’s Lager. The recipe was based off of educated guesses by Pete Jones and two other local brewers, Mike Stein and Joshua Hubner, based on the brewery’s invoices for materials and Heurich’s tastes.

For now, the beer will only be available at Heurich House events. Bender hopes it will be popular enough to spread to other D.C. bars and restaurants.

“I think it’s delicious, actually. Lagers are really good,” she said at the unveiling last week. “But I want to see what people think.”

This story originally appeared on WAMU.