Lobster Beer

Summer in Maine means blueberries and, of course, lobster. While there are plenty of blueberry-inflected beers, Oxbow Brewing is using lobster-flavored beer, called Saison dell’Aragosta, to capture summer in a bottle. (Aragosta, by the way, means “lobster” in Italian.)

The tasty crustaceans get added to the sour farmhouse ale at an early stage in the beer-making process. Brewers plunge a bag of live lobsters into the boiling wort. Once they’ve given up their sweet, briny flavor, the lobsters are fished out and eaten by lucky Oxbow staff. For an extra hit of the ocean, brewers add the shells back to the boil, along with some Maine sea salt. After removing the shells, mixing in hops, and aging the brew for about a year, the result is Saison dell’Aragosta. The finished ale is salty and tart, and beneath it all is the taste of sweet, briny lobster.