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Though the Germans would like us to believe otherwise, beer has long been made with ingredients other than barley, hops, and water. Of course, there's a reason 16th-century German brewers were kept to such a strict recipe regimen—you can add a lot of nasty stuff to beer to make it more potent, to make it last longer, or to stretch ingredients. These days, though, brewers usually add extras to improve their beer, not degrade it: coffee, pumpkin, tea, spices; there's beer made with chilis, beer made with hemp, beer made with beet sugar (called, cleverly, the Kerouac), and even, according to a Seattle performance artist, beer made with her own ... well, yeah.

With that in mind, is oyster beer really all that weird? Although it's a bit early to call it a trend, at least three bottled oyster stouts have hit the U.S. market in the last year or so: Porterhouse Brewing Co.'s Oyster Stout, Harpoon's Island Creek, and Flying Fish's Exit 1. The Harpoon and Flying Fish are American, while the Porterhouse comes from Dublin. (And they're not the first—a quick search on Beer Advocate found about a dozen other draft-only and limited-distribution oyster stouts over the recent years.)

Oyster stouts are exactly what they sound like: brewers shuck in five or six bivalves per barrel during the brewing process. By the time the beer is done, the oysters have completely dissolved, leaving behind just the faintest hint of salinity. Beware, though: Some brewers, like Marston's, don't actually use oysters in their oyster stouts; the name is simply to suggest an appropriate accompaniment. Still others, like Massachusetts's Cape Ann Brewing, will use shells, but not the oysters themselves, to balance the mineral content of their water.