Pearl of an idea

No-Li Brewhouse, which coined the phrase “Spokane style” for its beers, now is doing one Seattle style – with shellfish.

It today brewed its first batch of oyster stout with mollusks shipped straight from the Puget Sound by Shelton-based Taylor Shellfish Farms.

“They’re super fresh,” said No-Li’s John Bryant. “They took them right out of the oyster bed yesterday and shipped them over. It’s almost like getting fresh hops and doing a beer.”

Added toward the end of the boil, the oysters will impart subtle briney notes to the sweet stout, made with oats and lactose (milk sugar).

Stout and oysters is a traditional food pairing, and somewhere along the way brewers got the idea of actually adding them to the beer, though the history is a bit murky (some, like the well-known Marston’s Oyster Stout, contain shellfish in name only).

Modern craft brewers across the country, from Dogfish Head to Sam Adams to Rogue, have done occasional versions. Bryant said he first got the idea a couple of years ago when he sat on a panel with the owner of Port City Brewing in Alexandria, Va., which made one with Chesapeake oysters.

More recently, he was approached by Taylor, which pours No-Li beers at its Seattle oyster bars, about doing a collaboration. It seemed like a natural fit to Bryant, who grew up on the Olympic Peninsula within a mile or two of the oyster beds.   

“It falls in with what we’ve been focusing on – fresh, Northwest ingredients,” he says, such as local Gemelli coffee in the Rise & Grind milk stout, and Oregon cherries and cranberries in the tart Mosh Pit.

And Taylor, he adds, is “an amazing company. They harvest some of the best, freshest shellfish in the world. It’s an honor for us to be associated with them.”

The beer will be available on draft at Taylor’s locations and the No-Li pub in early March, as well as 22-ounce bottles. While those will likely be a specialty-store item in Spokane, Bryant says, orders already are coming in from Sound-area grocers.

“It’s kind of taken on a life of its own over there,” he says.