Illustrating a point

Not to belabor our grouse over that ugly Beeradvocate cover, but there is this addendum to make ...

It's easy to take a swat at someone else's work; it's another thing to show you can do better. A few minutes spent looking through the photos we've shot in the past three years turned up this image from 2008.

These hops ended up in Weyerbacher Brewing's special harvest ale of that year, tossed into the hopback on the heels of being picked on a late-August Saturday, from the acre of Cascades and Nuggets Dan Weirback put in the ground at his farm in Lehigh County, Pa. (Dan grew the hops the summer after that late-2007 price spike; now that there's a glut in the hops market, some brewers are pretty much irked and questioning what happened back then.)

So is this a cover-worthy photo, or at least an example of an eye-catching photo? Honestly not to brag, but we say yes.