Cuisinternship entries

As I mentioned last month, the good folks at Oregon Bounty organized a creatively titled Cuisinternship Contest that would pair selected winners (who entered by submitting a short video and even shorter Twitter-length essay) with some of the state’s culinary luminaries for a one-week, all-expenses-paid internship. The deadline has now passed — too bad, procrastinators — and the entries are in (here’s a link to see all of the entries).

Also as I mentioned, one of these internships is with Bend Distillery, where the winner will spend a week making gin and vodka and doing — well, I don’t know what exactly, but it’ll be whatever distiller Jim Bendis is doing at the time, so it’s probably going to be really cool. Anyway, there were eight entries for the distillery internship; I kinda expected more, but it looks like the idea of making beer or chocolate & cheese was just too appealing for many people, because those categories had entries out the wazoo.

I’m one of the judges for the distillery category, and the way it works is this: the contest organizers reviewed all entries and sent me their top five picks, and then I scored each of those entries across several categories and sent my top three picks on to the distillery, which will choose the winner, to be announced next week. I’m not going to reveal any of the semifinalists or finalists — I wasn’t selected for Skull & Bones and I passed on a career with the CIA, so I’ve gotta take my secretive cloak & dagger opportunities as they come — but I wanted to give each participant the opportunity to have their entries seen by you, the booze-loving blog-readers of the world.

Here are all of the eight distillery entries, in no particular order. I’ve already completed and sent in my scores for the finalists, so any comments or e-mails won’t affect the outcome of the contest, but I’m curious to hear who you think would be a good pick for the distillery internship. Let me know in the comments (but please, be nice — while you can salt the comments section at YouTube with any disapproving notes you like, I’d rather not have any participants insulted in the comments section of my blog — after all, this ain’t Congress).

And with that, here they are: the entries for the Oregon Bounty Cuisinternship Contest, distillery category.