By Will Grunewald
From our October 2022 issue
Josh Rogers didn’t think Mainers were eating enough seaweed. That’s why, in 2019, he started Seaweed Week. Now an annual affair, Seaweed Week comprises seaweed-cooking workshops, seaweed-identification tutorials, lectures on the economic and environmental value of seaweed, and lots of seaweed-inflected specials at restaurants around the state. Rogers hopes it will help build more of a local market to support the still-fledgling seaweed industry. “We have all this great stuff in Maine waters, especially with the growth of seaweed farms, but we need to get people working with it more,” he says. “So the goal was to get chefs thinking about it, learning about it, using it, seeing what other chefs are doing.”
Clockwise from top left: Cup of Sea’s Sea Smoke blend of lapsang souchong and dulse; a lemony Seaweed Week cocktail from Vena’s Fizz House, in Portland; Fogtown Brewing’s Scupper seaweed saison; Oxbow Brewing’s kelp farmhouse ale
The initial focus was on food, even though Rogers is himself a seaweed-drink maker — five years ago, he started Cup of Sea, mixing Maine seaweeds with loose-leaf teas: green tea with kelp, smoky lapsang souchong with dulse, rooibos with sea lettuce. (He also owns a retail shop in Portland, Heritage Seaweed, carrying everything from seaweed jerky to seaweed cuticle salve to seaweed dog shampoo.) When he started Cup of Sea, he knew of only one seaweed-infused drink in the state, a cider from Urban Farm Fermentory. Even traveling in Japan, where vitamin- and mineral-rich seaweed is a dietary staple, Rogers encountered only one type of seaweed drink, powdered kelp dissolved in hot water.
Clockwise from top left: Root Wild’s seaweed kombucha (right); Cup of Sea’s Great Wave blend of green tea and kelp; Maine Craft Distilling’s Fifty Stone whiskey, made with peat-and-seaweed–smoked barley; Barren’s Distillery’s sugar-kelp vodka
The savory, briny character of most seaweeds, he figures, generally seems like more of a natural fit for food than beverages. Still, that didn’t deter Maine drink producers from getting into the spirit of Seaweed Week. A few years ago, Foulmouthed Brewing dropped a seaweed stout. “It was maybe the best stout I’ve ever tasted,” Rogers says. “The umami and salt went really well with the chocolaty notes, which makes a lot of sense — sea salt and chocolate.” Since then, Maine’s seaweed-drink portfolio has only grown. The most recent Seaweed Week saw a mix of one-off and year-round offerings: seaweed beers from six breweries, seaweed mead from Maine Mead Works, kombuchas from Root Wild Kombucha and Urban Farm, seaweed-smoked whiskey and a seaweed-infused canned cocktail (called Mermaid Tears) from Maine Craft Distilling, and seaweed vodka from Barren’s Distillery. “During Seaweed Week,” Rogers says, “Maine was literally the seaweed-drink capital of the world.”
Seaweed Week returns April 21-30, 2023. 207-613-9744.
Photos courtesy of cup of sea (teas); courtesy of vena’s fizz house (cocktail); Courtesy of Fogtown Brewing Company | Ashley L. Conti (scupper); courtesy of maine craft distilling (whiskey); courtesy of barren’s distillery (vodka); courtesy of root wild kombucha (kombucha); courtesy of Oxbow brewing company (saison aquatic)
