Visual 2024

Every December for years I have posted a selection of my favorite photographs from the previous twelve months, usually with no caption or a brief one. Let’s mix it up this year. Below I present nine photographs with a mini-essay describing—or at least hinting at—why I chose it. Instead of a comprehensive visual tour of my year, I’ve selected these photos in part for their visual interest, but also because of what they say. Maybe a picture with a hundred words is worth more than a picture with none at all.

I still aspire to do a year-end think piece, a mandatory post according to the 2007 International Agreement on Blogging Conventions, but if I don’t, this little collection will nevertheless serve historians well enough in a pinch. We can’t go through the world without it staining our fingers, and leaving behind fingerprints as we go. The experiences refracted through these photographs are individual, but they are also universal in the way diaries and pictures from 1941 or 1968 or 2020 will always be.

These are arranged in no particular order, mainly because I want the post to end where 2024 began, in Hungary and Prague. Enjoy—

Let’s start in a pub, a word short for “public house,” and focus on that phrase’s first word. It’s an institution more damaged than at any time in the past hundred years, thanks to the ravages of a global pandemic, the effect of living a life through the screens of our phones, and a society turned curdled and mean. But in public—at a public house—is also where we might ultimately begin healing our dislocated, disconnected lives. On a random Wednesday evening, dozens of Portlanders availed themselves of Lucky Lab’s rumpus-room of old tables and chairs to play board games. There was no event inducing them to arrive, just the promise of the murmur of voices, fresh draft beer, and a slice of pepperoni. Social beings being social in a space purpose-built for their enjoyment. When the people find their way back into public squares we will see a society on the mend.

Xicha Brewing (North Salem), March 30, 2014.

Beer evolves, but not brewery menus. Pizza and burgers describe the offerings at the vast majority of the nation’s brewpubs. There’s nothing wrong with these items; they’re ubiquitous because we love them. But surely we could survive a little variety. My choice for the first round of expansion is tacos, and a good example are the ones served at Xicha. Like burgers and slices, they are a commoner’s food, a handheld delicacy best found on the streets. But they are also exquisite foods, developed over centuries, slow cooked and spiced in ways that rival the highest cuisine. Add a beer—many styles harmonize—and you have a perfect meal.

Bitburger returned to Portland this summer for their annual Bitburger Challenge (won by the Gold Dot team of Lisa Allen and Kevin Davey), and is a good reminder that Americans don’t drink enough imports. Our own breweries do a great job of offering fresh beer in the styles of foreign countries, but it’s never quite the same. As I do every year, I resolve to drink more beer from foreign shores—if I can find them.

On a night I joined with three other local writers to taste through a mixed case of winter beers, ForeLand was hosting its weekly Chess Night. The brewery’s Study is a converted house on Belmont street and the homiest of pubs in the city. The warmth and quiet was a perfect place for a game of chess. Alas, the players will castle no more: ForeLand announced it would have to close the Study at the end of the year. It is a loss for chess players and beer drinkers (who in the summer enjoyed one of the nicest beer gardens out back) and a reminder that if there’s a bar or brewery or taproom you love, visit early and often. That’s how we keep them around.

On Easter Day we adopted this little creature from the humane society. She’s 40 pounds of mutt and seems to have had a rough go of it in the seven months of life before we adopted her. She is scared of other people and as she ages, has gotten more barky-growly when she begins to regard any territory as her own. For first few months, she was a joy to take to pubs, but toward the end of summer, things started to get dicey. It would only take her twenty minutes to begin to think of our table as her turf, pity the poor neighbors and servers. We are working with a trainer, however, because no experience in this great wide world exceeds sipping on a beer while your canine companion works a bone at your feet. I hope to have it sorted by May.

pFriem Family Brewers (Cascade Locks), March 8, 2024.

American brewers have gotten very good deploying wood in the manufacture of tasty beer. Sadly, this competence arrived about the moment drinkers started losing interest in them. Some breweries persevere. One of the best is a sponsor of this here blog, pFriem Family Brewers, who served me one of the most memorable beers of the year—Druif Blanc—just moments after this photo was taken. Americans have taken refuge in the familiar and the uncomplicated since the global pandemic, and exotic beers like Druif Blanc, made with Riesling grapes and mixed fermentation, no longer seduce them. Fashions change, however, and eventually they’ll put down their Modelos and start looking for something more thrilling. Breweries like pFriem, who have continued to make these sophisticated, complex, and delightful beers, will be there when they do.

As the winter was thinking of loosening its grasp on the city, Sam Zermeño opened Brujos Brewing in the old Hammer and Stitch location in Portland’s Slabtown. Perhaps it was a metaphor, since we were hoping that the winter of Covid would be releasing the beer industry from its grip once and for all. That didn’t quite happen, but Brujos suggests a way forward even in difficult times. Since he started this project as a very elaborate homebrew “brand” eleven years ago, Zermeño has had a vision for Brujos. It had always lived in two dimensions on his labels, but the new brewery gave him the chance to turn it into an immersive experience. His “scorched church” brewpub features grim reapers, gothic chandeliers, arches and pews, all in a dim, blackened environment. He didn’t spend a million dollars tricking it out, but nevertheless transformed the space into something wholly original and—what’s this?—fun. At its best, that’s what a good pub should always offer customers, and Zermeño’s project demonstrates that there is plenty of runway left for creativity and, dare we say, innovation.

Perhaps no place on earth more ably illustrates the way politics can affect a population. These bronzed shoes honor the Jewish victims of the fascist Arrow Cross party, who assassinated them in Budapest in 1944-45. The fascists ordered the victims to remove their shoes before killing them at the river’s edge, where the water would ultimate take their bodies. At least to my eye, this memorial cast a very different mood than the pure, intentional evil of the German Nazis. Hungary was a place of chaos and wild instability, and this was part of an incredibly turbulent period. In the span of less than thirty years, Hungarians witnessed the fading Austrian-Hungarian empire fall in WWI, followed by the brief rule by local Communist revolutionaries (Hungary followed the Bolshevik Revolution by only two years), then the rise of fascism, and finally the return to communism.

All that history felt electric rather than distant because one visiting the memorial stands across the river from the Buda Castle, the grounds of which house the current Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. Orbán was the anti-communist crusader who founded a leftist political party that would ultimately become a tool of conservative illiberalism. And so the wheel turns. As I stood there in January, I reflected on the political instability afflicting western democracies, including our own. I took heart in thinking that examples like Hungary’s are now in our collective consciousness, and I hope stand as an example of mistakes to avoid.

On my third visit to Prague, I finally got to tour the 525 year-old U Fleků Brewery. It wasn’t the last of my bucket-list breweries to see, but it was my white whale, the most important one yet remaining. It didn’t disappoint. The question of oldest brewery will always be one of definition and debate, but if you want to visit a brewery that feels the oldest, this isn’t a bad choice. Brewing has happened in this same building since the fifteenth century (albeit its final year). Prague, similarly, feels old in a way many European cities don’t, with its uncountable spires, winding cobblestone streets, and vapors of history still redolent in the air. I have often been asked which is the best place to visit for beer, and offbeat answers like Vilnius or Portland aren’t exactly wrong. But when you’ve stopped into one of the city’s many incredible pubs for beer unlike any brewed elsewhere and followed it up with a tour through U Fleků, you can’t seriously give any other answer than Prague.

(If you’d like to see the whole photo essay, it’s here.)

Jeff AlworthDecember 23, 20244 Comments