There I was, at 7 a.m. on a Monday morning, pulling on rubber boots alongside Highway 1 in the parking lot at Schoolhouse Beach in Bodega Bay. The sun had just come up, and the minus tide was going out.

Why was I there? Well, I kept asking myself exactly that question on the hour-plus ride from Marin County. Bartenders don’t do early mornings really well, and I was joining a few other like-minded beverage service professionals on a seaweed-foraging expedition set up through Strong Arm Farm, Sonoma Coast Seaweed Co. and Sausalito Liquor Co. We were out there to harvest flavor, and that flavor specifically resides in seaweed.

Umami is the flavor we were looking for. First defined in 1908 by a Japanese scientist, it’s considered the “fifth” flavor, rounding out the field of salty, sweet, so

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