Oregon “Cuisinternship”

No, I didn’t make up that word — the good folks at Travel Oregon did, as part of a contest they’re running that is offering seven lucky winners all-expenses paid* one-week internships with some of Oregon’s top culinary craftspeople. (Get it now? “Cuisine” plus “internship”? Cuisintern — okay, you got it.)

So why am I breaking my now-customary post-Tales, late-summer blog silence to bug you with this linguistic oddity? For one simple reason: one of the internships is related to booze**. While other contest winners are making chocolate or cheese or herding cattle or toiling away as a chef’s kitchen slave, one winner will be spending a week with Jim Bendis at Bendistillery in Bend, Oregon. During that week the winner will gain some hands-on knowledge about the art of distillation, tasting the spirit as it comes off the still and helping with the bottling, as well as doing a bunch of other stuff that happens around the distillery.

Here are the details from the folks at Travel Oregon (emphasis mine, so you don’t miss any important info):

To enter the Oregon Bounty Cuisinternship Contest, applicants must submit a short video, along with a statement containing no more than 140 characters, describing why they are the best candidate at www.TravelOregon.com/Bounty. Seven winners will receive an all-expense-paid trip to Oregon to shadow their mentor for one week. Entries must be submitted between Aug. 24 and Sept. 18. A panel of judges, including the Cuisinternship mentors, will select winners which will be announced beginning Sept. 28.

And what’s it to me? Well, for the distillery Cuisinternship, I’m on the panel of judges, and I can’t wait to see some of the posts and videos for this contest (though I’m sure that in hindsight, there will be at least one video entry that I’ll wish I could un-see). If you’re reading this blog then you’re an excellent candidate for this internship — so go ahead and submit your entry, and keep an eye out for the announcement of the contest winner starting in late September.

* by “all expenses paid” they mean they cover airfare, lodging and $1,000 meal stipend. If you’d like to dig into the details some more, here are the official rules.

** Okay, I suppose three of the seven internships are alcohol related — in addition to the distillery internship, there’s another one at Penner-Ash Winery and one more at Full Sail Brewing. But c’mon, how many chances do you get to spend a week at a distillery?

5 Responses to Oregon “Cuisinternship”

  1. If I weren’t starting grad school in a couple of weeks, that would sound really interesting. As a biochemist, I’d love to learn more about how a distillery works hands on. Good luck to those who are both interested and have the time.

  2. […] 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). […]

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