September 24th Beer and Oysters Tasting at Mayflower in Plymouth-- Oyster Shell Recycling Starting in Colorado-- Hemingway on Oysters

September 24th Beer Tasting at Mayflower Brewery in Plymouth, MA

MOP will be sponsoring a beer tasting on September 24th at the Mayflower Brewery at

12 Resnick Road

in Plymouth from 3:30-6:00 pm. There is a suggested donation of $10 per person. We also will have Island Creek oysters for $1 each. 

Mayflower Brewing Company is a craft beer microbrewery located in historic Plymouth, Massachusetts. Founded in 2007 by a tenth great grandson of John Alden, beer barrel cooper on board the Mayflower, they are dedicated to celebrating the history and legacy of the Pilgrims by creating unique, high-quality ales for the New England market.

We also will be raffling off MOP merchandise in addition to having it available for sale.

To sign up go to our facebook page-, respond to this email, or email us. 

We look forward to seeing you there!

Oyster Shell Recycling in Colorado (?)

This spring we executed our first oyster shell recycling effort. and we learned a great deal and felt a keen sense of accomplishment. These programs are growing here in New England. The oyster shell from the Wellfleet and Island Creek Oyster Festivals will be reused to help sustain the species in restoration work. We were surprised to see it beginning in Denver!

Seattle Fish Company, together with Rappahannock Oysters and the Oyster Recovery Partnership , is proud to announce a brand-new oyster recycling initiative available to our customers. Rappahannock River Oysters is one of the premier oyster companies in the Chesapeake Bay. Travis, Ryan and their dedicated crew are innovators in the industry and have taken a lead on restoring the Chesapeake Bay to its former glory. For their efforts in the Bay and for producing amazing oysters, Food and Wine Magazine presented them with the coveted Tastemakers Award which recognizes spectacular talents who have changed the world of food and wine by age 35. The program will send used oyster shells back to the bay to become refuge and fertile oyster growing beds for future generations of oysters. James Wright of Seafood Business writes, “Living oysters are capable of filtering 40 to 60 gallons of seawater each day, improving the clarity and quality of intertidal waters by removing plankton, sediment, and excess nutrients. After shucking and slurping, their shells keep on giving, too.” Because oyster shells are such a limited natural resource, returning them to the Bay and its tributaries is critical. Recycled oyster shells are reused and replanted in the Bay with baby “spat” oysters attached. These “spat on shell” oysters are placed in sanctuary reefs and provide a natural habitat for new oysters and other marine life to grow. One used shell can host up to 30 individual baby oysters that will then grow naturally into clusters and repopulate sanctuary reefs.

Seattle Fish will provide a five gallon bucket and lid to discard empty oyster shells to all participating restaurants. As frequently as necessary, Seattle Fish will pick up the full buckets, provide an empty replacement bucket and lid, and ship the shells back to the Oyster Recovery Partnership in Maryland, where the shells will be cleaned, aged, and used for new oyster seeds to latch onto. The reused shells will then be recycled back into the water, helping to replenish the oyster supply. 

Great Oyster Quote from Hemingway
Richard Rush who publishes the Oyster Information Newsletter recently drew this to our attention.

Perhaps the most famous sentence about oysters in American literature come from a young Ernest Hemingway in his near biblical work about his life in Paris from 1921 to 1926. The book title comes from the opening title page. Says Hemingway: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

Early in the book, he is in a cafe and feeling a little lonely, jotting down a few notes. In his own words: "I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen "portugueses" and a half- carafe of the dry white wine they had there." He had ordered a dozen Crassostrea angulata - the legendary oblong oysters said to have descended spontaneously from the sinking of a single oyster-laden ship from the orient in a harbor in Portugal.

On page 6, he professes his love for oysters in the famous sentence: "As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans."

Sadly, the "Portuguese" oyster is rarity today in France. But the art of matching a perfect wine to any given oyster lives on. It is an ideal that we all share.