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Good Taste: Playing with oysters, smoke, salt, and beer

Two decades ago, Sam Calagione launched Dogfish Head in Delaware - and helped jump-start America's craft brewing revolution by taking an innovative "culinary" approach to beer, adding unconventional ingredients like coffee, raisins, saffron, and

Dogfish "Smoke in the Water" raw smoked oysters on the half-shell with a glass of SeaQuenchAle.
Dogfish "Smoke in the Water" raw smoked oysters on the half-shell with a glass of SeaQuenchAle.Read moreSTEVEN M. FALK / Staff Photographer

Two decades ago, Sam Calagione launched Dogfish Head in Delaware - and helped jump-start America's craft brewing revolution by taking an innovative "culinary" approach to beer, adding unconventional ingredients like coffee, raisins, saffron, and maple syrup long before strange add-ins became, well, the norm.

Now, he's transforming the oyster as we know it by infusing the holding pens of Chesapeake Bay oysters at Hoopers Island Oyster Aquaculture Co. with a "tea" made with smoked salts.

The resulting mollusks, called "Smoke in the Water," are available exclusively at Dogfish's new Rehoboth Beach restaurant, Chesapeake & Maine.

And they are definitely still raw, but also intensely smoky, as though they were steeped in brackish waters beside a campfire. Many oyster purists, I'm fairly sure, will hate them.

I think the smoke was more dominant than I'd prefer, but I am fascinated with the possibilities for future flavors added to living oysters. (Calagione already tried hops, but the oysters refused to open up and swallow the infused tea: "they clammed up.")

When washed down with a pint of Dogfish's SeaQuenchAle, a lime-tart blend of three German styles - Kolsch, Berliner Weisse, and a Gose made from actual Chesapeake salt water - the enhanced oyster was even more impressive, and its saline soul suddenly drifted right back up to the surface.

- Craig LaBan
Smoke in the Water oysters, $3 a piece or $30 a dozen, Chesapeake & Maine, 316 Rehoboth Ave., Rehoboth Beach, Del. 302-226-3600; dogfish.com