Eleven rare bottles of Prohibition-era whiskey found buried on a beach near Margate Pier

Austin Contegiacomo was playing catch with his sheepadoodle on the cold beach near Margate last month when his dog abandoned the game and began sniffing around.

There, lodged in the sand at the high tide line, were nearly a dozen sealed bottles of whiskey, embossed with “Lincoln Inn” and a detailed depiction of a man riding a horse.

Contegiacomo was intrigued. He’s not a drinker himself, but he looks out for the Shore.

“At the time, I thought the minimum I’d be doing is cleaning up the beach,” Contegiacomo, 28, said. He laid his jacket down, piled it with the bottles, cinched the drawstring, and carted the bounty away on his back. Soon after, he posted on Reddit about his find, wondering if any bottle diggers or whiskey aficionados out there had any insight.

It turned out Contegiacomo — really his dog, Koda — had stumbled across a rare trove of whiskey with a fascinating history. (Koda got an extra large bone that day).

The company that would later become Seagram’s produced Lincoln Inn whiskey in Canada during Prohibition, said Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter and whiskey expert who has written multiple books about spirits. Though also sold in Canada, the brand was likely intended to be smuggled across the border at the time. The bottles that Contegiacomo found were particularly beautiful, a throwback to an earlier era when distilleries would create specialized bottles with heavy embossing to showcase different brands, Risen said.

In large-scale operations run by transnational mobs, bootleggers ferried bottles of whiskey from the Maritime Provinces of Canada down the Eastern Seaboard. New Jersey was a particularly appealing place to unload clandestine cargo — relatively unpopulated, with wide-open beaches, close enough to big cities like New York and Philadelphia to get the product to large, thirsty populations.

In some of the most established enterprises, smugglers would even set up floating ships stocked with whiskey offshore. At night, when conditions were right, rumrunners would load up the goods, speed to shore, and then race back to the mother ship, Risen said.

Perhaps that’s how these Lincoln Inn bottles ended up in the ocean, and nearly a century later, on the sand near the Margate Pier.

“It would have to be an illegal operation where someone had to move really quickly,” Risen said. “When you’re moving whiskey in bulk packages like that, people tend to keep pretty good track of it.”

Contegiacomo, who works as a helicopter rescue swimmer for the Coast Guard, speculated that perhaps his Prohibition-era Coast Guard forefathers were trying to apprehend smugglers, who dropped the bottles as they rushed away.

Once he had washed off the sand on them, Contegiacomo distributed most of the bottles among his friends from work, many of whom have deep New Jersey roots and were enthralled by the history. Some people said he might be able to make money if he sold them off, but he didn’t care much about that.

“I’d rather share them with those guys than keep 11 of them in my garage,” he said. (He did save one for himself and one for his dad).

It’s possible there are more to be found. The day Contegiacomo and Koda discovered them, the beach had just been dredged to refill the eroded sand, Contegiacomo said. There were construction vehicles and hundreds of conch shells and horseshoe crabs scattered across the sand — as well as the other, newly dredged treasures. The next day, Contegiacomo’s coworkers returned to the same spot and found another intact bottle, as well as some broken ones that they cleared away.

So far, no one has tasted the spirits inside, though Contegiacomo said he would if someone else popped a bottle open.

“I wouldn’t have a lot of hope that particular set of bottles would taste very good. Those are not prime storage conditions, under sand,” said Risen. Then again, he added, “Maybe that turns out to be a great place to store whiskey.”