When Novato homebrewer Kevin McMahon brewed a session wheat beer in late July, he bucked the hottest trends in beer making and used no hops at all. Instead, to do something original — indeed, something few brewers had done before — he added dried nori seaweed. Called Umami Mommy, the low-alcohol beer represents what I believe will eventually develop into a new style, OK, maybe a sub-substyle, on the West Coast — seaweed beers.
In a June column, I questioned why it was that nobody, so it seemed, had brewed such a thing. Seaweed, after all, is rather common as a food, and it is uniquely flavorful — exactly what a brewer might want to add to an experimental beer. It turns out that there was, indeed, a small wave of interest developing. McMahon was already pondering where to get his seaweed for the soon-to-be beer (he eventually bought it at Trader Joe’s), and at a small brewpub in the SoMa District of San Francisco, brewer Jim Furman was drafting plans to do something similar.
Now, the world is abruptly awash in the stuff. Well, that may be an exaggeration. But after basically an eternity of almost nobody making a seaweed beer, it is remarkable that two have appeared within weeks of one another, just miles apart.
McMahon made his beer in a 13-gallon batch. He started brewing it as a sour gose style. Then, while grabbing a sandwich at Trader Joe’s while the beer was boiling back at home, he saw some packaged nori snacks on the shelf and he decided this would be the time. He bought four of them, and back at home the originally planned gose transformed. McMahon added whole oysters and sea salt with 30 minutes left in the 90-minute boil. Finally, he added German ale yeast and one package — about 12 grams — of nori. It was coated with toasted sesame oil, and it left a prominent mark on the flavor profile of the beer wort, so he left it at that.
“It tasted like sweet green tea,” he says.
Finished and bottled now for weeks, the beer, he says, has made mostly positive impressions and has even got the members of the Marin Society of Homebrewers — of which McMahon is the vice-president — talking about experimenting with seaweed in many more beer styles. McMahon says he may next brew a seaweed porter.
“But definitely not a stout, because seaweed is a subtle flavor, and I wouldn’t want it competing with the roasty malt flavors,” he says.
In San Francisco, Black Hammer Brewing’s seaweed beer went on tap last Friday at a popup event with Luke’s Lobster, an East Coast seafood venue that is opening a location in San Francisco. The beer — a collaboration between Black Hammer and Luke’s Lobster — is a saison, a style that traditionally has some spicy character to it. Brewer Furman and his friends at Luke’s decided to build on that by adding seaweed collected at low tide in San Mateo County and crushed lobster shells from Luke’s kitchen.
“While we were boiling it, it was scary — it smelled like we were boiling whole lobsters on the stove,” Furman says.
But the beer wasn’t ruined. Instead, he says the beer “has a delicate savory note you wouldn’t normally expect in a saison, and the finish is like seafood.”
The beer will be on tap at Black Hammer until, well, it’s gone.
Furman says he may brew another batch of something similar, depending on the reception the seaweed saison receives.
He noted that “to do something new in craft brewing is so valuable and rare now, because we have so many breweries compared to just a few years ago.”
McMahon says he had been contemplating making a seaweed beer for two years. He notes that seaweed is a common food, that millions of people consume it, and that it’s exceptionally flavorful, and that so few brewers had thought of using it before he did surprises him.
“It just makes me wonder — why did it take so long?”
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.
