Todd Douglas
A sliver of land along Portersville Bay in Alabama was once known as Myrtle Point. But in 1927, a deadly dispute erupted between the Lawson and the Copeland families over an oyster lease. A Copeland beat a Lawson with a baseball bat, set him up in a rocking chair, and then shot him on his front porch. Myrtle Point has been “Murder Point” ever since.
Since the turn of the twentieth century, oysters have been an easy prize along the Alabama coast—even if they did spark the occasional feud—and many made their livelihoods through harvesting the bounty. (Seventy percent of the wild oysters harvested in the United States come from the Gulf Coast, according to Gulf Coast Seafood, and Alabama processes more of them than any other state.) But the game has changed in recent years from a public frenzy to a passion project. Blame it on the introduction of farm-raised Gulf oysters, each rock tagged with a specific place of origin and a reputation to uphold.
Murder Point Oyster Company, owned and operated by the Zirlott family, was one of the first to begin farming its oysters in Alabama. Nothing about the Murder Point oyster hatchery lives up to its sinister name; rather, every element is languorous and a bit dreamy.
Upon arrival, guests can ditch their shoes on the dock and lower themselves via ladder into the warm, undulating steel waters of Sandy Bay, just outside of Mobile. Bottom soil, heavy and slippery with clay, squishes up thickly between the toes as a wader heads into chest-deep water toward neat rows of closed, cylindrical plastic-mesh baskets that hang suspended from PVC pipe strung between pilings. At midmorning, the hatchery baskets, each filled with eighty to one hundred growing oysters, are suspended just above the water, allowing the swells to gently wash and polish the specimens within the baskets with the slow roll of the tide.
Todd Douglas
As the waves wash over them, the oysters ingest only the Gulf’s rich nutrients, not the mud mixture their wild brethren subsist on. Once a week, they are lifted out of the water for twenty-four hours to dry out and bask in the sun, ensuring nothing grows on their luminous shells. They are graded and sorted by size and run through a tumbler to break down the ragged edges of their shells. This makes the oyster shells shorter, tougher, and easier to open up without the shell breaking. Tumbling also causes the oysters to clamp down and makes their muscles stronger. The result is a small, plump oyster in a deeply cupped shell.
In an homage to its storied location, Murder Point also makes custom, pointy-tipped, copper-banded oyster knives called “shanks.” The tagline for their business? “Oysters worth killing for.”
Murder Point was established four years ago by shrimper Lane Zirlott and his parents, Brent and Rosa. For five generations, the Zirlotts have made a living pulling seafood from the Gulf of Mexico. Recent generations have worked as fishers and shrimpers, but Brent Zirlott still has his great-grandfather’s oyster license from 1892. With the establishment of Murder Point, the family embraced the modern incarnation of its oyster tonging roots. Today’s Zirlotts are invested in off-bottom, intensive aquaculture.
In 2012, Rosa Zirlott enrolled in a training course presented by Dr. Bill Walton of the University of Auburn’s Shellfish Lab at Dauphin Island. As part of the hands-on course, students were given 25,000 small “seed” oysters and loaned equipment with the assignment to grow them to maturity in the lab’s training waters in Portersville Bay. The Zirlots were quickly inspired to raise an additional 500,000 oysters on their own.
Oysters owe their appearance and taste to the waters in which they grow. Murder Point oysters are creamy and plump with a flavor Lane Zirlott compares to salted butter. They are a first-class specimen that commands a premium price. The Zirlotts refer to them as “love-crafted” oysters, a white-tablecloth variety better suited to glasses of crisp Sancerre or fine champagne than buckets of beer.
Lane Zirlott is justifiably proud of his “butter babies” and grateful for the freedom oyster farming gives him from the comparably hard, absentee life as a shrimper.
Todd Douglas
“Now I can be home with my wife, Amanda, to raise our children, Lane and Laila. I am no longer on the water for as many as thirty days at a time,” said Lane. A perfectionist, Lane obsesses over the oysters as one might a coterie of needy children. He fusses over them, he said, “from daylight to dark.”
Today, Murder Point is one of the biggest of the fifteen producers of farmed oysters in Alabama. Its original farm in Portersville Bay has 5,200 baskets; and a second, larger farm in Grand Bay should produce one million oysters for harvest in late 2017. The oysters are sold regionally and shipped around the country.
Though oyster farming has been common in the northeast for years, the volume of southern farmed oysters is expected to quickly surpass that of the north due to the extremely high nutrient content in the Gulf. While northern oysters are ready for harvest in two years, here they are ready in fourteen to sixteen months. They are plump and at their best from October through the cold months, when the salinity is high due to a decrease in the rains of the warmer months. Like their northern counterparts, the southern oysters benefit from the safety of the caging system that makes them inaccessible to predators.
In Louisiana, upscale restaurants such as Jolie Pearl in Baton Rouge, OxLot 9 in Covington, and Seaworthy and Trinity Restaurant in New Orleans sell Murder Points raw on the half shell, either unadorned, with a bright Mignonette sauce, or with a simple squeeze of fresh lemon. To mask their hard-earned delicate flavor and lush texture under a blanket of catsup would be yet another oyster crime.
Murder Point Oyster Company
10870A Beverly Road
Irvington, AL
(251) 379-4892
