I was born into this. Dad started back in the early 1950s selling oysters. He would have been looking for some way of staying locally. He didn’t want to be heading off to England. The local pub here, Paddy Burke’s [in Clarinbridge, Galway], was his first customer. They are still a customer 70 years later. Once I could count or stand at the table and do something, I was brought out and put working. You’d be counting or picking out different grades. Soaking it up.
I can remember eating the baby oysters, when they break them off the shells. They would have been the first oysters I would have got a taste for. I can remember the sounds and the smells of all that.
I knew I was going to end up here after school. I went to Letterkenny for a year to do an aquaculture course to learn about the industry. A good oyster has a nice deep shell with a good solid fish inside with a nice flavour off it, a good level of saltiness and a good finish on it. Obviously, you can only taste that when you eat it, but from looking at it, really it’s the shape and the weight in your hand. If it’s too light for the size of the shell, the meat might not be so heavy inside it.
When you open an oyster, it should be smiling back at you. You can see it glistening, the freshness of it. There’s kind of a glint out of it, there’s plenty of water in it, and it’s still moving a little bit. It looks inviting. The flat native wild oyster is something I’m very passionate about. They grow in the wild and reproduce in the summer. The months without the “r” in them, we don’t handle or eat them in those months. Oysters can take five or six years to grow before they are harvested.
The seeds for farmed oysters come from a hatchery. You put maybe 2000 baby oysters into a mesh bag on a trestle on the seashore. They grow and you split them every couple of months until you have maybe 150 oysters in your bag after about three years. You have to keep the edges clipped off them by shaking and rattling them to create that teardrop shape.
When they are younger, they are down in the water as much as possible. They are moved higher up the shore to get used to being out of the water so they don’t panic when they are packed and sent off. The main thing with the oyster, like ourselves, is it doesn’t like to be stressed. If you can have them stress-free, they are much nicer and they last longer.
One of the amazing things about them really is they are taking in all this phytoplankton – they can filter up to 11 litres of water an hour. We don’t give them anything. Oysters are ecosystem warriors because they are cleaning the water. It’s great to be working with that type of product. Every oyster farmer has the best oysters in the world. The difference is what we call “merroir” – each bay has its own flavour coming from the phytoplankton growing in that bay.
I am concerned about climate change. We had a marine heatwave in June last year when the water was five or six degrees above normal. That created a lot of stress on the younger stock and a lot of farmers had mortality of stock. All of your work for those couple of years is completely wiped out. It wasn’t just Galway Bay, it was all the way to Scotland, which was frightening. It just shows you how small you are and how little you can do about it. If that’s going to be happening every year, it’s going to be a challenge.
With drainage, a lot more fresh water is coming down and the flat native oyster is very sensitive to that. The approach taken used to be, just get the water off the land and out into the bay. When it all comes at once, the fresh water can drown native oysters.
Ireland is our biggest market. The peak for us would be the Oyster Festival here in Galway [in September]. A lot of younger Irish people coming back from their travels have seen oyster bars or eaten oysters at festivals. Irish people’s palates are becoming a little bit more adventurous. They are seeking our environmentally friendly food.
Some people are nervous of oysters. We recommended they smell the oyster first, to bring themselves to the coast, and then they take a sip of the water to prepare the palate, so it’s like dipping your toes in the water. Then you slide the oyster into your mouth, you let it swirl around and take a bite. You have the essence of the ocean there in that mouthful.
Are they an aphrodisiac? When you are eating oysters and you’re enjoying life and you’re maybe having a glass of wine, anything can happen.
We export as far as Whistler in Canada, down to Singapore and maybe 14 countries in between. It’s unreal. When you sit at the top of the Burj Khalifa, or Bentley’s in London or Harrods and you see people eating a Kelly oyster, you are sort of scratching your head going, “How did this happen?”
Dad was proud of the way it had developed. Myself and my brother Mícheál and our wives and now Mícheál’s son Michael is here full-time as well. It’s great our oysters are given respect. You are thinking about all the work that has gone into them and you feel very proud.
In conversation with Joanne Hunt
