Crab Trapper? Just water for me, please

There's a well-known local brewery that makes a cannoli-flavored ale, and the proceeds of the sales go to local charity. I'm involved in a charity that was the recipient of a couple of years worth of cannoli-flavored ale profits, and it's amazing to me that there are so many people willing to buy it. I'm sure a lot of people picked up a six as a novelty item - the can mimics the color scheme and look of a well-known local cannoli maker. Me? I think of it as a gag gift. Literally. 

I seldom drink ale or beer - pretty much my only ale-ish, beer-ish drink is Guinness stout, and that's only when I'm in Ireland - but mucking up the taste with cannoli whatever? Just no. Just one big gag-inducing no.

Come to find out, weirdly flavored alcoholic bev is a thing. As in a crab-flavored whiskey, called Crab Trapper, produced by a New Hampshire distillery. 

Although I'm a New Englander lifer, I'd never heard of green crabs.

Horseshoe crabs (which, come to find out, are not really crabs), which are all over the Cape. I know about them. There are areas in Wellfleet that are minefields loaded with hundreds of shed horseshoe crab shells. Or would be minefields if there were anything dangerous about old shed horseshoe crab shells.

And we have plenty of fiddler crabs, those cute and tiny little suckers that poke their heads out of the sand.

But green crabs? 

Turns out they're all over the place, and they're more than a nuisance.

The crabs, which came over on ships from Europe in the mid-1800s and landed on Cape Cod, have taken the region by storm. These saucer-size crustaceans with a murky green color have decimated the area's marine ecosystem, outcompeting native species for food and shelter.

[University of New Hampshire Extension's Gabriela] Bradt, a fisheries extension specialist, said the crabs are “so numerous that they have really impacted shellfish habitats and fisheries because they are also voracious predators." A good example, she said, was the soft-shell clam fishery, which has suffered millions of dollars in losses. (Source: Boston Globe)

Green crabs are an invasive species, so I guess this is a good thing that someone's found a way to cull the herd.  

And crab-flavored whiskey - as ghastly as it sounds - is no weirder than Tamworth Distilling's other efforts. 

In the past, the distillery produced a whiskey with the secretion from beavers’ castor sacs. Last year, it was turkey over the holidays and before that the notoriously pungent smell of durian.

Beaver castor sacs, you say? Aren't they the little sacs situated next to the beaver anal gland? No thanks. 

Turkey-flavored whiskey? Is that like Wild Turkey, perchance?

Durian smelling whiskey? Hard pass on that one, too.

Actually, hard pass on it all. Although I drank plenty of Jack Daniels in my day - a fact that shocks me now when I think about it; I can no longer even imagine drinking a Jack and anything: bring me a cannoli ale instead - I haven't had "brown liquor" in years. Decades, even. These days, I'm mostly a prosecco kind of gal. 

So no thanks to Crab Trapper, even though it sounds sort of tasty:

The company said the body of this peculiar brew has hints of maple, vanilla oak, clove, cinnamon, and allspice. And no, you won’t get any crab legs in the drink.

Mostly, the distillery's aim is to "separate out the funky smells of the crab from the more inviting aromas." That and rid the New England waters of some nasty green crabs. 

Not that they'll be able to make a dent in their numbers - unless Crab Trapper ends up catching on. 

Meanwhile, there are other strategies for combating the invasion of the green crabs, including a bounty program. 

I'll drink to that - just not a slug of Crab Trapper.