Forage-Friendly Flipper: Vosteed Griffin Hawkbill Knife Review

Foraging is a lost art that I find incredibly rewarding in the warmer months. It usually starts with fiddleheads and ramps at the beginning of May. Then the hunt for morel mushrooms starts around Mother’s Day, as long as the weeks leading up have been warm and rainy. After that, there’s a wide variety of berries — low- and high-bush blueberries, wineberries, and raspberries — that you can count on until the end of June.

To forage efficiently, you need a means of carrying your incredible edibles back to cook (like a dump pouch or millbank bag) and a good knife.

Initially, that was my grandmother’s Victorinox Floral Knife. A nurseryman who worked with flowers and plants for more than 50 years, she loved the ease of the sheepsfoot blade, which excelled at harvesting berries and fiddleheads.

Later, I invested in my own Opinel’s No. 08 Mushroom Knife. Its hawkbill blade made it easier to harvest morels, which are closer to the ground than fiddleheads. And the built-in boar’s head brush was a nice addition for cleaning debris off my edible treasures.

But recently, Vosteed Cutlery reached out to see if I wanted to test out any knives. So, drawn to the Griffin’s length, ergonomics, and wonderfully exaggerated hawkbill blade, I picked out my new foraging folder. Thanks to climate change, rumors of fiddleheads popping up as early as the second week of April sent me scouring the banks of the Connecticut River with the Griffin in hand — weeks ahead of schedule.

In short: The Griffin by Vosteed Cutlery takes your foraging game to the next level. Featuring tough, stainless 14C28N steel and G10 scales, you can expect to efficiently hunt and harvest all the tasty goodies your local woods, forests, river banks, or mountains have to offer. I had a small window to really test this knife in the wild, and I was happy with the results. The Griffin performed beautifully.

Editor’s note: Foraging edible plants and fungi can be a dangerous endeavor. Before you consume any foraged food, be sure you have correctly identified it. If you aren’t sure, don’t eat it. You can likely find experts in your area to help you correctly identify your find. Mistakes can cost you your life.

Vosteed Griffin Knife Review

Design & Features

Let’s get this out in the air now — 14C28N steel may not have the superior qualities that MagnaCut has, but as MagnaCut was in 2023, 14C28N steel is everywhere in 2024. Why? For starters, it’s affordable.

But more importantly, it’s a stainless steel that excels in corrosion resistance, toughness, and ease of sharpening. While combined, these characteristics make for a great knife steel, stainless steels generally aren’t known for being as tough as 14C28N is.

Vosteed forms that 14C28N stainless steel into the Griffin’s hawkbill blade of this large form flipper knife. The blade has a compound grind which aids in its excellent slicing and cutting properties. However, it’s not so pronounced that you’ll run into complications sharpening it in the field or back at the homestead.

For its flowing and thin handle shape, the Griffin utilizes G10 scales. It also has an exposed and pronounced G10 backspacer. This design creates an enhanced ergonomic feature that allows your thumb to push down close to the spine of the blade while still filling the palm of your hand.

Anyone looking for a deep carry pocket clip as a necessity for their EDC knives should steer clear of the Griffin — and probably Vosteed as a whole. But having experienced a few of the brand’s knives at this point, I don’t really find it an issue at all. I just know some folks like to stuff their knives deep into their pockets.

First Impressions

You look at a knife like the Griffin and expect it to be a backup tool carried by the Orcs in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Its exaggerated lines are the things of fantasy. However, once you get the Griffin in your hand, you understand how form can benefit function in a fantastic way.

Knives with narrow handle profiles and big fat blades hanging out past the pivot take up a little more space in your pocket, but the design can pay out in spades when it’s time to go to work. In the case of the Griffin, being a hawkbill style knife, its thin, long handle allows you to get a comfortable grip in a lot of hand positions, while still allowing you to work the blade comfortably.

When mushroom hunting, I have to blindly reach under the head of the mushroom and try to make a clean slice through the stem. Considering the 3.5 inches of curved and sharpened edge the Griffin has, it should be very efficient in any foraging task.

Looking beyond foraging, a knife like the Griffin may be a tad polarizing as an EDC. I can throw more Tolkien references in here, but what I am saying is, this isn’t your standard pocket knife.

If you pluck this from your pocket when someone asks for a knife to cut a ribbon on a kid’s birthday present, it’s going to raise some eyebrows. However, if you were a first mate on a competition sailboat, the crew may mutiny and make you captain once they see how effective the Griffin is at cutting rope.

Ultimately, this is a knife I will use for gardening and foraging. Though there’s little to no reason to believe that you couldn’t adopt it as an EDC, it really comes down to your lifestyle.

In the Field

While I am not happy to report that I got skunked out of morels this year, I was knee-deep in fiddleheads. The beauty of a hawkbill-style blade is that you can flip it over so the edge is facing toward you and put what you’re cutting between you and the edge. This allows you to make a series of effective and clean cuts, leaving your targets to drop into a pile in front of you.

This is ideal in foraging.

Though the Griffin did not become my EDC, it is clipped into the pocket of my dump pouch because it’s an effective tool for harvesting. I actually used it to pick some flowers for my girls when we were out hiking.

We were out on the trail and I found a bunch of different flowers that I needed to clip on the sly so they didn’t see me. The Griffin’s ergonomics and function-driven form made that possible. By the time we got to where we stopped for lunch, I had a handful of spring natives for my daughters to fawn over.

I don’t think I am telling any trade secrets when I say that foraging is a wet and messy job. Having a stainless steel like 14C28N on a knife like the Griffin was an epic choice on Vosteed’s part. I clean all of my knives thoroughly after any major excursion, and to say that this knife was wet for the better part of a month wouldn’t be far off.

There’s not a spot of rust or discoloration on it, save for some fading berry juice on the bright yellow handle scale.

In Conclusion

Even though this is the second review of a Vosteed knife that I have written, the Griffin started it all for me. I was drawn to both its form and function. I think most of you would be as well.

When you consider gardening, foraging, and pruning knives, the Griffin runs a little more expensive at $79. That’s due in part to the fact that manufacturers know these tools will be used and abused in both wet and arid environments.

In its price and materials choices, Vosteed acknowledges that it has something that can withstand the rigors of a wet and wild life.

In the end, I may eventually go back to my Opinel, or even the Victorinox Gram gave me before she passed away. But for right now, in 2024, I am smitten like a kitten with the Vosteed Griffin.

In fact, I am going back out with it right now to see what else I can gather. If you’re serious about foraging, clipping, pruning, or advanced picking of everything edible out there, don’t sleep on this hawkbilled badass.