More tales of stout on a half shell

Flying Fish's use of oysters in a stout may inspire homebrewers to put bivalves in the boil, too. But a couple of homebrewers from Monmouth County's bayshore turned in an oyster stout four months ago.

Shucks, that's a couple months before FF folks officially tipped their hand about where and what the next Exit Series beer would be.

Bill Comella of Highlands says he likes FF's Exit 1 Bayshore Oyster Stout, but it was Ventnor Brewery's Oyster Stout that inspired him and his co-brewer, Bobby Soden, members of the WHALES homebrew club, to get shellfish (OK, bad pun) with a 10-gallon batch of foreign export stout. The pair brewed on a three-tiered system fashioned from half-barrel kegs and used oysters bought at the Lusty Lobster seafood market in Highlands.

"We just put 'em in a big sack and dropped it in the boil with 10 minutes to go," Bill says. "Then we ate the oysters. There was more stout in the oysters than there was oyster in the stout."

And the beer? "It came out great."

The Ventnor Bill refers to is in the United Kingdom, not the Ventnor south of Atlantic City. The latter, as we know, is tangentially world famous as one of the yellow properties in Monopoly (Ventnor Avenue, price $260; rent $22 unimproved, $1,150 with hotel); the former is located on the Isle of Wight, famous in rock 'n' roll history for a multiday music festival in 1970 that was bigger than Woodstock 1969 and was one of Jimi Hendrix's last live performances.

Bill discovered Ventnor Brewery's oyster stout while in Amsterdam a few months back. The brewery went out of business last March, a victim of a seasonal economy and stingy bankers who wouldn't float it a loan to hold it over until the economy emerged from its winter doldrums.

Aw-shucks

Lew Bryson had a note about it on Monday, and the brewery tweeted on it, too. But we were emailing owner Gene Muller about it today: The next Exit Series bomber-bottled beer from Flying Fish is an oyster stout, due out in November.

The folks at the brewery are still shuttling between Cherry Hill and the Delaware bayshore of Cumberland County to get oysters from Bivalve Packing, a small seafood wholesaler in Port Norris.

By the numbers, this beer will be Exit 1 (Carneys Point, land settlers bought from the Lenni Lenape tribe for 80 gallons of rum and some cutlery). By the map, we're talking deep, deep in South Jersey, where you'll find not just oysters but Bivalve also, a locality within Commercial Township (the township in which Port Norris is also located) and Shell Pile, which is what you get after shucking a Meerwald load of oysters.

New Jersey's oyster industry in Cumberland County crashed in the late 1950s, virtually wiped out by disease. But it has since been revived. Like Springsteen sang: ... Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

Or gets saluted with beer.