Oregon Bounty: Enter to win

Travel Oregon has announced a “Cuisinternship” contest, which is really seven contests. Despite the tongue-twisting name any would be nice to win. Requirements include a video camera and a Twitter attention span.

The prizes: Seven winners will get to hang out with an Oregon culinary personality in a week-long cuisine-internship. The winner of the Brew Master category will spend time making beer with Jamie Emmerson of Hood River’s Full Sail Brewery. I pass that along because the information was in my personalized press release. Insider tip: Go for the cheese/chocolate combo. We visited both those places during our Grand Adventure.

To enter: Applicants must submit a short video, along with a statement of 140 characters or less explaining why they are the best candidate for their dream job.

Here’s the link.

I’m not entering or I wouldn’t be telling you about this.

 

News flash from 1879

From “Berlin Under the New Empire,” written by Henry Vizetelly in 1875:

“Through Prussia the larger breweries are swallowing up the smaller ones which have not sufficient capital to make the needful modern improvements by means of which they might compete on more equal terms. Within the last thirty years upwards of half the Prussian breweres have had to give up business, though the consumption of beer has been steadily increasing.”

You connect the dots.

 

Would you drink a purple beer?

Prickly Pear Wit - New Mexico State Fair

Prickly Pear Wit - New Meixo State FairThis is what can happen when you judge in beer competitions, particularly homebrewed beer. The beer pictured here is a Prickly Pear Wit. Although Pierre Celis, the Belgian who resurrected the dead Belgian White or Wit style, later moved to Texas, founded the Celis Brewery and took to wearing a bolo tie was an inventive guy no proof exists he thought of brewing a beer with the fruit of prickly pear cactus.

We have a lot of prickly pear in New Mexico, so folks make wine with the reddish fruit, use it in mead and I’ve previously had a prickly pear pale ale.

But never a wit. Until Saturday morning. We were judging fruit beers in the New Mexico State Fair Pro-Am competition, amateur division. Just finished back-to-back cherry Berliner Weisse beers. The note with this entry said the beer contained no artificial coloring. Wow.

Alas, this might not have been the best brewing idea ever. When prickly pear meets wit the wit flavors get run over.

But the execution was better than in the afternoon, when I sat on a panel that judged a Prickly Pear Lambic. This was from a commercial brewery (judged blind so I have no idea what one, but bless their heart for trying.) Prickly Pear meets vinegar (acetobacter), nobody wins.

Don’t you wish you were a beer judge?

#46 – Where in the beer world?

Where in the beer world?

Think you know where in the beer world this photo was taken?

Leave your answer as a comment. Also feel free to add a comment simply because the picture inspires you.

Here’s a hint that probably makes it too easy: “Pass the salt.”

 

And we have a winner, and a winner, and a winner

Did you know that Rogue Dry Hopped Red is the World’s Best Pale Ale?

That Waldhaus Diplom Pils is the World’s Best Lager?

Or that Samuel Adams Imperial White is the World’s Best Flavoured Wheat Beer?

Until I received a press release from the Brunhaut Brewery about its two awards I hadn’t seen the World Beer Awards 2009 results. How did that happen?

This is the competition organized by Beers of The World, the UK publication that recently ceased its print edition. Obviously a well conceived way to judge the beers with excellent judges (Roger Protz headed it up), but of course the winners are really “World’s Best [Fill In The Category] That Paid To Enter Our Contest.”

The best reason to give these a look is they aren’t organized like the Great American Beer Festival, World Beer Cup, United States Beer Championship or your basic American homebrew competition.

Not to pick on any of those — I’ll be judging in a homebrew competition this weekend — but the notion that the United States might write the beer style guidelines for the world should at least make you pause.