The following story was contributed by Megan Hill.
When Cody Morris, brewmaster at Epic Ales, told me he planned to make a sour oyster gose, using shells, meat, and brine, I thought: That’s disgusting and awesome. I need to try this.
While Morris’s oyster gose might be unprecedented, oyster beers are not that all that uncommon. You’ll see them most often as oyster stouts. Morris told me a bit about the history of these stouts, which date to the 1800s.
“Certain regions in the UK have really soft water. The problem with soft water is that all your roasted grain beers, your stouts, can come across acidic and tart. So a lot of times stouts work much better in places with really hard waters, like classically Dublin has insanely hard water,” he says. “When you use roasted grain in hard water, then you get something that’s a little smoother.”
I’ll spare you the chemistry, but brewers figured out that adding oyster shells increased the PH of the water, making it “harder.” The result was a smoother beer without the acidic edge.
American brewers have put their own twist on the classic oyster stout, adding brine or even whole oysters. These beers have a creamy mouthfeel.
Puget Sound brewers aren’t producing a whole lot of oyster stouts on the regular, but Upright Brewing in Portland releases one each year using Hama Hama oysters from the Hood Canal. They just released their 90 cases of this year’s stout a few weeks ago.
I spoke with Alex Ganum, owner and head brewer at Upright, who told me how they make the oyster stout.
“It’s a pretty straightforward stout recipe and then we add into the kettle, while the unfermented beer is boiling, eight dozen pretty large whole oysters and then eight gallons of oyster juice,” a byproduct of Hama Hama’s processing. The oysters add a briny finish.
“If you love oysters, and you stick your nose in the glass, you should be able to get that faint whiff of the actual oyster aroma. It’s a subtle thing,” Alex says.
Morris’s gose also uses Hama Hama oyster shells, oyster meat, and brine, but in a totally different style of beer than Upright’s stout. Gose (pronounced GO-zuh) is a traditional German wheat ale that is salty and sour, and typically incorporates coriander. Morris left out the coriander in his oyster gose, called Bottom of the Sea, but the oyster brine contributes the requisite saltiness.
“It’s a pretty intense and strange beer so you definitely have to be a person who likes to have their palate challenged. There’s a lot of stuff going on,” Morris says. The gose will be released next week.
Morris is partnering with Hama Hama to make an oyster beer each quarter this year. The project will include a smoked pale, and a Belgian dubbel, both with oysters. He hasn’t figured out the rest yet, he says, but I’m sure they’ll represent well Epic’s trademark weirdness.
Follow Voracious on Facebook & Twitter. Follow me at @MeganHillWriter
