This Gose is light bodied and crisp with a strong salty minerality and light fruit notes. The flavor of eelgrass comes through as a herbal starchiness and a mild seaweed umami.
The beer was brewed in collaboration with Black Narrows Brewing (The first craft brewery on the Eastern Shore) and the Nature Conservancy's Volgenau Virginia Coast Reserve Chapter. Eelgrass, a keystone plant in eelgrass meadow habitats which once covered the coast and bay in Virginia, was largely eradicated in Virginia by hurricanes and disease in the 1930's. These meadows once provided shelter for spawning seahorses, bay scallops, and horseshoe crabs, as well as providing a physical barrier to erosion from the barrier islands, oyster reefs and the eastern shore beaches. Eelgrass provides both a substrate for new barrier island formation as its leaves pile on sandbars, and a form of sequestered "blue carbon" trapping large amounts of atmospheric CO2.
In 1999, a patch of eelgrass was found in a seaside bay off the coast of Virginia, likely the result of seeds or plants drifting down the coast from Chincoteague Bay. Since then, in no small part due to the efforts of volunteers and staff at the TNC, eelgrass meadows now cover an area larger than 9,000 acres. This collaboration is a celebration of the restoration that can occur when people passionately pursue conservation, like the over 500 volunteers who have aided in collecting and distributing eelgrass seeds in the past decade.
5.3%ABV
