Carolyn Bennett on why Kennet Crayfish Company is putting its name on a surprising product… Gin!

We recently had a conversation, Carolyn, about two words that I’ve never seen together before: ‘crayfish’ and ‘gin’! So… Crayfish gin! Whose product is this?
The product is from Kennet Crayfish Company, based in Kennet Valley in Berkshire… They have Britain’s largest fully licensed processing plant for crayfish. Their managing director, Andrew Leech, was a crayfisherman for many years and used to catch signal crayfish – an invasive crustacean species in our waterways.

Signal crayfish, did you say? They’re invasive?
Yes. Signal crayfish are a North American species… Effectively, they’re a freshwater lobster – but smaller, obviously. However, they’re much bigger than our native crayfish which are teeny-tiny. The American species was introduced quite a few years ago from a farming perspective, for food. But they got out into the waterways… And they’re hugely successful in the worst way. The native species is getting knocked out by these signal crayfish, which are also very destructive to our rivers.

This has already taken an unexpected turn! In what way are they destructive?
They eat the fish eggs; they burrow into the banks, and they carry a kind of plague that kills off native crayfish. It’s a kind of grey squirrel, red squirrel situation. Now, because those crayfish are so invasive, the government has said that you can’t farm them – but nor can you catch them without a license. They’ve sort of closed everything down, which means these things have gone berserk!

Berserk! My days! So Andrew used to catch these little blighters?
Catch them and export them, yes. He used to catch tons and tons of them – and export them live to Sweden. Over here, they’re not so widely consumed as a food, but the Baltic and Scandinavian countries eat them a lot… Anyway, after Brexit happened, we could no longer export live food – so these crayfish were left in rivers to breed indiscriminately and cause a huge amount of damage to the riverbanks.

I’m finding this fascinating… How to they damage the riverbanks?
They burrow into them to hibernate! They can tunnel up to 20 meters in, which weakens the riverbank – sometimes to the point of collapse. In turn, that silts up the river which affects the whole ecosystem. Anyway, Andrew Leech started talking – pure conversationally – to my father, John Bennet. John was intrigued about all this and decided to invest and set up a new company to get the appropriate licenses, capture crayfish and start selling them as food.

Because it sounds like it’s an untapped market, it’s sustainable and it would do the environment the power of good!
Exactly. You do need to have special traps and the right licenses and to make sure you’re not affecting the other wildlife on the riverbank. They’re basically lobster pods that don’t catch the wildlife that feeds on crayfish… A proper crayfish trap won’t trap otters or beavers or the like. So he set up this quite large facility that catches the crustaceans safely and processes them humanely.

Oh! Yes! Because some people’s idea of processing a crustacean would be to boil it alive, presumably?
Yes, which is just horrible. Quite rightly, legislation is going through to stop that anyway. But were ahead of that because we believe that they’re sentient animals! So Kennet developed a humane way of processing them. And now we produce part- and fully cooked crayfish – either Swedish or Louisiana style, or just in brine as a food source. And that’s all going very well. But what dad wanted to do was see if there were other ways that we could use this crayfish rather than just as a food source.

Hence… Gin. And I suppose the question most people will have is: “Does this gin taste of fish?!”
Right! And the answer is no. Crayfish actually has a sweet, delicate flavour. So here, the crayfish takes away some of the tartness you sometimes get with gin… It takes that away and gives it a sweetness and a delicacy of flavour. It lets all the other flavours come through without destroying the gin taste.

So who was it, Carolyn, that looked at crayfish and said: “That’s perfectly suited to gin!”? Who took that creative leap?
It was Andrew. He was talking to a distiller at a get together, and they suggested trying it. It came out of nowhere. So it’s not like we were all sitting around a table and brainstorming.

Ha! No! And who’s the distiller? Who’s producing this?
We’ve gone to a local distiller, Hawkridge. They have an award-winning gin base and are experimenting with subtle flavours… Adding watercress, for example, or even elderflower. Because we basically see this as a riverbank product – so we want those kinds of botanicals. We also want the right aroma: not too flowery and not too lemony.

Because there’s more to gin than just the taste, isn’t there?
Oh, yes. Some of it is very subtle. Another quality of the crayfish is that they release oils – and one sign of a really good gin comes if you pour in a mixer, and you see a twirl the gin… That’s the oils from the citrus and the ingredients releasing it to give it the taste. And the crayfish does the same, so it enhances that and allows it to have that really premium swirl.

You make it sound very tempting – and I don’t even drink! And this is the first licensed product, as I understand it. What else might we expect to see?
Yes… The majority of crayfish are seasonal. You can catch them all year round, but in terms of huge numbers, they’re seasonal from May to the end of October. And so between October and May, we’re going to develop some other products. We’re very lucky in that I know a phenomenal wildlife chef called Anna Fiddler. It happens that she’s local and happens to know Andrew, happens to know me, and happens to live five minutes down the road!

That’s fortuitous!
Isn’t it?! So my father is working with Anna on some other products that use crayfish to make it an-all-year-round product. None have been finalized but we’re looking at crayfish butter – which is actually popular from a premium-restaurant perspective. She’s also looking at crayfish stock, crayfish pesto. Kennet has also done some oils in the past… We may well go back to those, but they’re quite specific in their usage and we want to be a bit more mainstream in our products.

Tell me, Carolyn, what your background?
I tend to describe my background as always having seen something I find interesting and asked what I can help with! So I’m not the entrepreneurial kind in the invention sense… I’m an enabler, really, or an editor… I go into existing small businesses and lend my expertise – if you can call it that! Often, it’s a case of hearing a problem and being able to say I know someone who can fix it. So I tend to put together teams to get a business flourishing. Anyway, I got involved in Kennet because my dad was talking to me about it, and I got excited about it.

And you bought Larkshead in?
Yes, I started talking to Julia Vockrodt about how much of a business there is here. Julia thought it looked very, very good – and so I said to my father, in effect, that they’d really like to get involved. And that fell into place nicely because – at that point – they needed to get on and sell the crayfish and didn’t necessarily have the capacity to work out how to do all the other products.

Well, we need to start wrapping this up, Carolyn – but what an education! I didn’t know that I didn’t know that much about crayfish – or gin, for that matter! My final question would be this… What’s the one thing I could’ve asked you today that I didn’t?
The only thing that comes to mind is: why Larkshead?

That’s an excellent question! What’s the answer? Why Larkshead?
I’ve worked with Larkshead on some other products – from animation through to documentary companies… All sorts of iterations. They have a legacy of successfully leveraging food and drink brands. Plus, I’ve known Clare Piggott now for probably eight or nine years. She happened to say that she wanted to do a new food and drink brand. And I said, “Funny you should say! I’ve just put my size twelves in a food and drink brand. How do you fancy it?”

It’s a match made in heaven!
Right – it ties in with John’s desire to find other ways of making this a twelve-month, 365-day-a-year business. I know what Larkshead can do. They’re incredibly creative, they have a huge number of contacts. And so it wasn’t just about a retail exposure, although obviously that’s part of it. But we can build on that, for example, with recipe books or aprons or other areas of licensing and merchandising that a food and drink brand wouldn’t necessarily think to leverage.

Fabulous. Thank you so much for telling me all about this, Carolyn. I hope you’ll keep us posted.