and the Winner is...

J.D. Jorgenson is the winner of two Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild Winterfest tickets. Thanks for all of the entries. It was REALLY tough to choose a winner. The poems I recieved were great as well as the other essays. Minnesotans are truely passionate about beer and their local breweries. I'm also happy to see folks are thinking about the "green" benefits of buying local hand crafted beer. I plan on doing some blog entries on some of the things I do at the brewery to be a little more earth friendly.

Here is the winning entry:
I believe brewing beer is an old art, craft and trade that needs to be held on to like the old Carnegie libraries. Today there are far too many historic buildings being torn down to be replaced by a faint glimpse of what they were. Brewing good beer is very similar I believe. I view brewing as an art form. The time, patience, labor, craftsmanship and love put into brewing are the same attributes fundamental to fine furniture making, writing, timber framing, stone building, blacksmithing, pottery and other art forms. These attitudes, lifestyles, an awareness to detail, should be passed on family to family, generation to generation, artist to artist, brew master to apprentice. I am a firm believer in quality not quantity. That’s why I believe in what McCann’s is doing, you are home brewing small batches to be appreciated and shared. Unlike a number of macro breweries that focus on quantity, McCann’s focuses on taste, depth, aroma and texture. While I do not brew anything but coffee, I do know that brewers such as yourselves, Fitgers, Town Hall Brewery, Surly and a few others make us want to support our local breweries because you transform brewing into an art form. We want something handmade and full of flavor because it fits with a fine night of cooking food, music, friends, family and great conversation. If we don’t support our local brewers, artists and folk arts I believe we will soon loose our identity of who we are and where we live. The small town, front porch, back roads and our sense of adventure rely on this knowledge to be passed on and held firm and continued. The pace of our lives will continue to get faster and faster. Sitting down and enjoying a pint or growler of Minnesota home brewed beer with friends, and appreciating another person’s labor of love slows us down and reconnects us. It brings us back to our hometown, the front porch, that wonderful meal and to the friends and family we wished we would see more of.

Best of luck to McCann’s Food and Brew. May there be many years of great beer.