“We feel a lot of kinship with oysters,” says Rubinstein. “Similar to us, they’re small but contribute a lot. They’re such an amazing creature.”

It’s said that eating an oyster is like tasting the sea. Capturing the flavors of their underwater homes thanks to their filter-feeding habits, oysters are a perfect expression of merroir — the marine version of terroir. But oysters actually do far more than harness the essence of their environments. From filtering and cleaning up to 50 gallons of water each day to forming oyster reefs that protect coastal areas from erosion, oysters provide outsized environmental benefits compared to their tiny footprint (or should we say, shell print).

Now, one distillery in Providence, Rhode Island is paying homage to this small but mighty mollusk in a spirit that not only manifests the oyster’s merroir but also gives back to its watery home.

Oysters: From Slurping to Sipping

As a new business, it’s hard enough to find your sea legs even without contending with a pandemic, but that’s just what the Industrious Spirit Company (ISCO), a distillery based in Providence, Rhode Island, had to do. Opening in early 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, this craft distillery — the first in Providence since Prohibition times — weathered a stormy first year, getting by by making hand sanitizer.

A year later at the anniversary celebration, the team was toasting their survival with vodka cocktails and oysters when a thought popped into the heads of co-founder and CEO Manya Rubinstein and her distilling crew: what if we combined the two?

“We wanted to try something new,” says Rubinstein. “We come out of an artist community and we’re makers; we try to do things that have never been done.”

After much tinkering by head distiller Dan Neff and the ISCO distilling team, a one-of-a-kind pearl of a spirit was finally produced in 2022: Ostreida Vodka. While other distilleries have experimented with using bivalves and oysters, Ostreida — which gets its name from the oyster’s taxonomic order — is the first-known example of a vodka distilled with oysters in the United States. By directly distilling fresh oysters with a corn-derived spirit during the final distillation, the result is a bracing sea breeze of taste, clear and sharp with undercurrents of salinity.

While early batches of Ostreida Vodka were made with oysters from local Rhode Island oyster farms, ISCO has since branched out. They’ve partnered with oyster farmers along the northeastern seaboard so that different batches reflect regional flavor variations.

Making Waves in Sustainable Distilling

Like its namesake animal, Ostreida Vodka seeks to make a positive impact. Its base spirit is made in-house with organic corn sourced from Stone House Grain, a regenerative farm in New York’s Hudson Valley. After distillation, the spent grains go to a local farm to feed livestock, while the left-over oyster shells are composted. As an oyster’s flavor and quality directly reflect its environment, each bottle helps to keep oceans and marine habitats healthy by way of partial donations of sales to regional non-profits. For example, ISCO has partnered with Billion Oyster Project, which is working to restore oyster reefs in New York Harbor, and Greenwave, a sustainable and regenerative aquaculture initiative.

“We feel a lot of kinship with oysters,” says Rubinstein. “Similar to us, they’re small but contribute a lot. They’re such an amazing creature.”

But even before creating Ostreida Vodka, sustainability and embracing local ingredients were integral to ISCO’s work and mission. The company housed its production facility within a repurposed industrial mill with rooftop solar panels and makes most of its spirits with locally sourced grains from sustainability-minded farms. Through ISCO’s spirits, which include offerings like single-origin bourbons and gin made with New England-grown seaweed, Rubinstein hopes to spark conversations about sustainability and farming in the distillery’s Providence cocktail bar and tasting room, while highlight distilling’s agricultural ties.

“Distillation and farming have a long and beautiful history together — you used excess product and distilled something from it,” she says.

Being in an industry with its own significant environmental footprint — it takes nearly 37 liters of water to make just one liter of spirits — ISCO shows that big changes can start small, just like with their beloved oysters.

“We see ourselves as storytellers,” she says. “We tell cool stories about what’s going on in climate-smart farming and make spirits with that.”

Oyster enthusiasts, martini maniacs, and anyone curious enough to try Ostreida Vodka — and supports its work giving back to marine organizations — can find it at stockists throughout Rhode Island and in neighboring states, or online for shipping.