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Tamworth Distilling's Crab Trapper whisky is flavored with blue crabs caught off the coast of New Hampshire. These blue crabs arrived in Europe around the 1800s, where they consumed tons of shellfish and devastated estuaries and fish habitats.
The blue crab is an invasive pest that has plagued North American marine ecosystems for over 200 years. A distillery in New Hampshire is tackling the problem by using them to produce blue crab-flavored whisky. Blue crabs are so abundant that this solution alone isn't enough to reduce their numbers, but some experts hope the new whisky will offer innovative solutions.
The blue crab is an invasive species that has colonized ecosystems in many US states.
Will Robinson, a product developer at Tamworth Distilling and the person behind the project, said the crabs are cleaned and prepared just like any other crab you might order at a restaurant.
"Everyone will reject the idea of crab whiskey at first, but if you can get them to taste it, they'll change their minds," Will Robinson asserted.
Crabs caught off the coast of New Hampshire are first cleaned and then crushed to create a crab broth. This broth is then distilled using a vacuum machine and combined with spices such as mustard seeds, coriander, cinnamon, and bourbon.
Each bottle of whiskey uses about half a pound of blue crab, but a single distillery wouldn't significantly impact the population of this species. Dr. Gabriela Bradt, a marine biologist and fisheries expert at the University of New Hampshire, says that's because their numbers have gotten out of control.
Each bottle of whisky from Tamworth Distiller's distillery uses half a pound of blue crab.
"The blue crab is probably one of the most successful invasive species we know of in North America, at least in marine ecosystems. A single crab can eat up to 40 mussels a day, and if you multiply that by the number of individuals in the population that is growing, they will wipe out the mussel population in the wild," Gabriela Bradt shared.
Warmer sea temperatures due to climate change have created a more favorable environment for the invasive crab species to thrive.
Currently, there are no effective solutions to control the population of the blue crab, nor is there a real commercial market or fisheries industry for this invasive species. In fact, the blue crab is edible, although it doesn't have much meat. The difficult processing and the perception that it is an invasive species mean that few people want to eat them.
