As many of you know, we jsut opened a nano brewery, production only.
The name of our comapny is “Dungeness Brewing Company” as we started out homebrewing about a mile from the Dungeness River in Dequim, WA. And, the dungy is quite popular here.
Anyway, a town about 50 miles away (Port Townsend) has a Strangebrew fest every winter. It’s a blast of a weekend. Very strange beers on top from area breweries. From a hellfire pepper to orange creamcycle, rootbeer flavored beer, a Salt and Pepper beer. Just very wierd stuff. Some are actually pretty good. LOL
Anyway, my little pee brain thought of brewing a crab flavored beer. I’ve seen recipes for a bacon beer, so why not. A quick search found one guy thinking of using salt free Old Bay, yet no crab. That does make sense, but wondering what someone else might offer.
That’s funny, I had a thought today about brewing a sushi lager with nori and sake. The thought of adding crab to make a California roll beer crossed my mind, but I just can’t bring myself to add meat to my beer…
At the 1996 NHC in New Orleans one of the Crescent City guys made a mudbug beer for the keg-only competition. IIRC he boiled a batch of crawfish with no spices in the water, then used that water to brew an all grain batch. It really tasted like mudbugs. I had one glass. It was pretty cool. A second glass was not tempting though. It wasn’t a session beer.
Mic, cook your crabs, eat the meat, then throw the shells in for the last 5 minutes of the boil. It will get you the flavor without wasting the crab meat. Don’t use Old Bay, that stuff is great on blue crabs but I think it would ruin Dungeness.
I use Zatarain’s liquid crab boil. You can add it drop-wise until you reach the desired spice level.
However, I would not use it for a crab beer. Any crab boil is way too spicy. Tom’s idea about boiling shells is a good one. Lots of flavor in them shells.
BTW it’s good to see you chiming in again Tom. Vacation?
I know this one! He is, as am I, frustrated that the “new” button doesn’t work on anything but IE, so he only looks at the forum once a day at the very end of the day.
Not to say that it isn’t weird, but it’s been done. A couple years ago John Maier decided to brew a batch of oyster stout. Not to be outdone, Nate Sampson (at the time brewer at the Eugene City Brewery/Rogue) made a Dungeness crab porter. It was…interesting. Get in touch with me if you want his email to ask him about it.
This is, in fact, the truth. Well, that and I’m having a really busy summer. There was some vacation in there, a bunch of work, some brewing. I cleaned 8 carboys today, and there’s 8 lbs of pork butt smoking over pecan wood right now (it’s only up to 178F, I’ll be up a while) so there’s that ;D
By the time I check the forum at night either the questions have been answered or there’s too much to read so I skip through a lot. But putting dungeness crab in beer would be a crime, I couldn’t let Mic do it.
But you know over here we have more Dungy’s than we know what to do with. Just this past weekend, we got 15 more in the freezer. And we still got about a month left of the season… I can’t believe they sell them for $20 a piece at Pike Place.
