If you can make lemonade from lemons, you can make "claw-some" whiskey from invasive green crabs. But how does it taste?
They call it House of Tamworth Crab Trapper, with a "seacret" ingredient of green crab, an invasive species that's wreaking havoc along the New England coast. "It has crab on the nose, for certain," says Steven Grasse, owner of Tamworth Distilling in New Hampshire, further describing the whiskey's taste as "a briny and better Fireball."
Crab Trapper was released in late May for pre-sale and developed with help from the University of New Hampshire's NH Green Crab Project.
Tamworth says the "sustainable spirit" is made from a bourbon aged just shy of four years. It's distilled using a modified sour mash approach and the same grain bill as the distillery's Old Man of the Mountain Bourbon (82.4% organic corn, 11% organic Maine rye, 6.6% malted barley).
Thousands of green crabs, weighing a total of 90-plus pounds, were harvested by a local trapper from the region of Seabrook, New Hampshire, for the whiskey. The crabs were delivered to the distillery to be cleaned and cooked down to a crab stock. When cooled, the stock was fortified with Tamworth-made neutral grain spirits and distilled on a large rotary vacuum still "until the ideal crab essence was achieved," the company says.
