This year's photo contest has been a real treat. A great response from prize donors as well as a great response from you the readers. We had 39 entrants email photos in time and then three more try to get their pictures in after the deadline. We have awarded 22 prizes in all and now have just one left. Again here is what the winner of winners wins.
♦ Oxford Companion to Beer, Oxford University Press.
♦ A subscription to TAPS The Beer Magazine as well as 2 TAPS glasses, a CBA glass and a TAPS t-shirt.
♦ A subscription to All About Beer magazine - as well as a high likelihood of the photo being featured in an edition later in 2012.
♦ A beery bar towel from Shipyard Brewing of Portland, Maine.
♦ Adrian Tierney-Jones and CAMRA have offered two copies of Great British Pubs.
♦ Beer and Economics, Oxford University Press.
In addition, they join the ranks of these five great winners to date.
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Do you see my problems? I really like the one to the left, John Lewington's photo of the sinister black eye watching the urban English street outside the pub - but he's won it all before. I can't do that so soon in to the inevitable decades of the Xmas photo contest... can I? And two photos to the right of that Jeff Alworth has an amazing photo of the Cantillon koelschip. I like this shot a lot as we have had a number of entries from Cantillon but I like how this photograph is so three dimensional, how it shows the space well and also how it describes the process of opening the windows to let in the wild yeast. But Jeff is from Portland, Oregon and I will be damned if I am going to award 50% of all grand prizes to the same town over the course of more than half a decade... I won't have it. Frankly, this was the winner until I put that table together up there and remembered where Dave and Matt were from. Blame them, Jeff.
What to do? Between Jeff and John sits a fabulous lucky shot from Adrian Tierney-Jones from the moving brewing line from Jenlain of France. It dates from 2005 and Adrian told me he was being shown round the brewery by Raymond Duyck’s father who had been so instrumental in getting the brewery recognized in the 1970s. But Adrian has published what I am considering possibly the best beer book in a very good year for beer books. Fame, praise and wealth are sure to follow. He won't give a rat's ass about winning this come mid-February. Can that be the fate of this grand contest?
Finally, to the right, we have a gorgeous silhouette of a man and his beer in, I am pretty sure, Germany submitted by Boak and Bailey. Older gents in bars having a quiet beer and a smoke has been a surprising theme over the years. I always assumed they were dirty smelly drinks but when a keen eye gets involved they look like angel. Lars in Norway has submitted another couple of real gems in the genre. But hasn't it been done? I am just not sure. So, I need a few more moments to think about it all. Maybe I should pick on of these after all. Maybe I should pick that sweet shot that has grown on me since 2008. I need a moment more... I need a beer...
[More below.]
Comments
Matt Wiater - December 19, 2011 11:49 PM
Congrats Jeff!
Craig - December 20, 2011 12:22 AM
All right Jeff—good job!
Jeff Alworth - December 20, 2011 2:15 AM
Whoo hoo!
First of all, I'd like to acknowledge what everyone will instantly recognize: if they had been standing on that little landing outside the koelschip, they'd have taken the shot, too. It's no testament to my skill as a photographer (poor, a fact I am reminded of anytime I look at one of Matt Wiater's photos), just to my luck at being in Cantillon when the wort was splashing into the koelschip.
By weird harmonic convergence, I have a post on Cantillon and Boon in the hopper for tomorrow morning, including this picture. In that post I described the moment I visited the koelschip, which was invested with an air of communion. I have so long enjoyed lambics and so long heard about the Brussels area where they're made that when I arrived on that landing, I just stood in the mist and soaked it in. Taking photos was actually a bit tough--my camera kept fogging up. Once I finished documenting the event, I went back to enjoying it. I even returned a little later on for another hit.
I'm with Alan--Cantillon gets outsized attention when so many other breweries make amazing beer in anonymity. That didn't detract from my moment of communion, which was one of the three or four Spalding Gray-esque perfect moments of my European adventure. I think somehow that came out in the picture.
So thanks, Alan!
Jeff Alworth - December 20, 2011 2:19 AM
Oh, and the Oregon thing. It just goes to show you're a man of integrity, unwilling to let bias enter into the picture. I mean, sure, you can't swing a virtual dead cat through cyberspace without hitting an Oregonian, but that shouldn't enter into it.
Integrity.
ATJ - December 20, 2011 4:38 AM
Thanks Alan for kind comments on the book, enjoyable competition, worthy winner, I love Cantillon, but then I love so much beer I fear that I would drown in the love it provokes within me.
Bailey - December 20, 2011 6:01 AM
Very well deserved win for Jeff. That's Austria in our pic -- Schaerding, just over the German border, very near Passau. An absolutely lovely little town with several breweries.
Jeffrey - December 20, 2011 12:01 PM
Congrats Jeff! Great post Alan. I truly enjoyed only scrolling down far enough to read each paragraph and see each picture one at at time. Very fun!