The story
For thirty years, Swedish chemical engineer and scientist Gunnar Jegrelius built an astounding archive. He collected research reports, theses, essays, manuscripts, newspaper articles, press items and books from 1700 to 1980, concerning some 200,000 chemical substances and their effect on humans and the environment. A total of 6 million documents divided among 600 metres of shelf space.
There was only one problem with this unique and extremely important resource for current and future environmental research. After Jegrelius’ death in 1981, no-one find their way through the material.
The archive sunk into oblivion, and was later moved to Östersund, where environmental engineer Peter Mosten was given the duty of indexing the archive in order to facilitate research.
During his work, Mosten found a recipe torn from a Swedish book printed in 1785. Its title was: Birch Champ**** (strict EU regulations prevent us from writing the full title as the word ‘Champagne’ may only be used to denote a sparkling beverage made of grapes in the French region of that name).
Curiosity took the upper hand; Mosten decided to make sparkling birch wine from the recipe. The result was ... revolting. It would take a decade of experimentation and testing before Mosten even came near to anything worth selling by the bottle. Finally, he achieved Sav™.