Yes I know I took a picture of a bottle of St Eriks last week but I can’t help myself. It’s just so easy to photograph (compared, for example, to a bottle of Sailor).

For just 15.90 SEK you not only get yourself a very contemporary and highly drinkable American-style pilsner but you also get an elegant vase to put your Easter flowers into thrown in for free!

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This has to be one of the best re-brands of a beer I’ve ever seen.

Simple, clean, elegant – this 330ml bottle of St Eriks Pilsner is so attractive it was an obvious candidate for beer art.

I don’t yet know if the beer inside is as stunning as the bottle it’s sitting in but I’ll be tasting it on BeerSweden TV in the next day or two to find out and I’ll let you know first right here.

Hats off to all those involved in the redesign of this bottle. You’ve just made beer even more sexy

I’ve spent the morning flicking through all the photographs sent in for the Beertography contest we’ve been running over the past couple of weeks and after much deliberation I’ve finally managed to pick a winner.

It wasn’t easy – the standard of entries suggested that beer was not only the main subject of most of the pictures but that it may also have played a significant role in the moments leading up to the photographs being taken.

Therefore although only one lucky BeerSweden reader is going to bag the cool beer glasses from those nice chaps at Wicked Wine I have decided to give honourable mentions in a number of new categories I just made up.

And therefore, without further ado, the winners of the first ever BeerSweden Beertography Competition are………

Best Use of Focus

Goes to Johan Lenner for this shot of a bottle of Sierra Nevada ESB. Note the pin sharp focus on the chequered tea-cloth in the background, leaving the bottle and beer itself perfectly out of focus.

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Most Questionable Use of Beer

Goes once again to Johan, who took this shot while making his very first beer float with home-made almond ice cream. Despite the quality ingredients and the fact I’m sure it tasted delicious I can’t help but feel a little queasy every time I look at that glass, can you?

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Best ‘Shaggy Dog’ tale

A clear winner in this category, thanks to Per-Gunnar Eriksson’s saga about his struggle to get hold of a green Guinness hat on St Patrick’s Day.

The story, which starts in London a year ago chronicles his attempts to find a Guinness hat to celebrate St Paddy’s Day with, only to be thwarted at every turn until eventually, in a pub in Umeå, he manages to find a hat. The fact that it is a Murphy’s Irish Stout hat and he’s drinking an extremely non-Irish glass of Fuller’s ESB somehow makes the picture complete. Confused? I thought so.

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Best Use of snow

Goes without question to Daniel Nieminen for his excellent series of beer bottles set in a winter landscape. Snow and beer was a bit of a theme among the entries but Daniel nailed it. Good work!

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Best Use of a Lighthouse

Another clear winner here. with Pelle Stridh’s summer vacation shot of”Långe Jan’, the lighthouse on the Swedish sunshine island of Öland, which provides a dramatic backdrop to a cold beer from Öland’s own microbrewery.

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The Runner-up

It was a close run thing, but the runner-up spot goes to Henrik Nordvall for this great shot of a bottle of St Peter’s beer. Vibrant colours, great bokeh, good focus on the subject and a fresh, spring-like feeling to the whole image. If I’m going to be really picky I’d say that a crop to lose the surface the bottle was sitting on and straighten up the image would have been great, and that a more Spring-like beer than a stout would have really made it. But that would be very very picky. Good work Henrik!

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And the winner is……

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Anders Lindberg for putting a smile on my face with this shot. Anders cunningly took one of my fav beers of the moment and gave it a seasonal twist with a clever bit of copywriting.

Congratulations Anders. A box of beer glasses is on its way to you later this week and I hope you put them to very good use!

Stay tuned for a new beery competition coming any day now. This time we’re giving away an exclusive hoodie from US brewery Great Divide Brewing Co – one of only 20 in the whole of Sweden!

We are now only a few days away from deciding the winner of the first ever BeerSweden Beertography competition.

The stroke of midnight on Sunday, March 21st is the absolute deadline for entries, so if you’ve got any beery pictures lurking around in your hardrive now is the time to finally put them to good use for the chance to win some funky beer glassware from those jolly nice chaps over at Wicked Wine (who despite the company name also love their beers!)

I’ve already received lots of photos from budding beertographers throughout Sweden and the standard is pretty high so please keep them coming in!

If you haven’t already got any beery pictures then just grab a bottle, your camera and take one! As way of inspiration here’s a beertography shot I took a few minutes ago (although I seriously wouldn’t recommend drinking Mohawk Extra IPA in the sauna – the combination of perspiration and extreme levels of hoppy beer would probably leave you looking like this).

We are now one week into the BeerSweden Beertography competition and already I’ve had lots of photos submitted from budding beertographers (bottles of beer and snow seems to be a clear theme developing here….)

Please keep them coming in and remember you’ve still got until midnight this Sunday, March 21st to send in your entries, so get your camera out and start taking more beery pictures people!

They make your beer taste better - that's a promise!

As if being crowned the country’s best beertographer here at BeerSweden isn’t enough the overall winner will get a parcel of cool glassware from those very nice chaps over at Wicked Wine. They represent some of the most exciting beer brands you can find in Sweden right now, including the sometimes controversial but always memorable Flying Dog range of beers from the US. These beers with their quirky, eye-catching labels can often be found in the fridges at many of the best beer bars and pubs in the country, so look out for them next time you’re out and about.

As well as x2 Flying Dog In-Heat Wheat glasses the winner will also take home x4 stylish Einbecker Brauhaus glasses which are perfect for pouring Einbecker Ur-bock Hell into. Doing this will raise your beer geek factor by x10 when you next have your friends around for drinks. I’ll probably be throwing in a mystery beer T-shirt or two as well for good luck (and to stop the glasses breaking in transit).

Are you ready to get out their and capture your best beery moments? Need a bit more inspiration (it is after all a Monday)? Well then here’s a picture I took yesterday while out on the slopes trying to disprove the myth that Englishmen can’t ski (unsuccessfully as it turned out). We can, however, take pictures of beer and drink it afterwards.

Good luck!

(ps: Send your photos to me at darren@beersweden.se no later than midnight on Sunday, March 21st! This particular competition is only open to people living in Sweden – I can’t afford the postage you see).

*I’m bumping up this article that I posted yesterday as I can see from Google Analytics that a lot of BS readers spend more time drinking beer (or recovering from the effects of it!) than reading about it on a Sunday.*

They say a picture says a thousand words. I’d like to think a picture can also tell the story of a beer.

Earlier this week in a moment of creativity (which don’t come along that often) I took a couple of pictures of the beers I was going to be reviewing. It seems a lot of you BS readers liked them, which started me off thinking “why not combine our mutual love of beer with photography to create an entirely new way of wasting our spare time – beertography!

To kick things off BeerSweden is launching what I confidently suggest is the world’s first beertography competition.

The rules are pretty simple. Just whip out your lens and take a photograph of the beer you are currently drinking. It can be a bottle or a pint/glass shot but try and get the beer brand name in the frame as I’ll be sending the winning picture to the brewery in question.

It doesn’t matter if you have the latest DSLR camera and a studio in your basement or take the picture in a pub using your mobile camera. It’s not the quality of the picture that necessarily counts – it’s the story it tells us about your special moment with beer.

As an example here’s a picture I took this morning. I had to lay down on the ice surrounded by bemused youngsters hurtling at great speeds on sharp blades of steel just inches from my ears to get it. It struck me then that this wasn’t normal behaviour for a grown man on a Sunday morning. Isn’t it great what you’ll do in the name of beer?

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So here’s how it works. Send your best original beertography picture to me at darren@beersweden.se as a JPEG around 250 KB in size by Sunday, March 21st. I’ll promise to post every single picture here on BeerSweden (assuming they’re legal) and will decide and announce a winner and one runner-up on Monday, March 22^nd.

And the prizes? Well I’m going to have to get back to you on that one. I’m currently arm wrestling with a couple of the major beer importers here in Sweden for some pretty special items, but one thing is certain – they will be the best prizes ever given away on this website

(Ed note: That shouldn’t be too difficult. The last prize we gave away was a T-shirt).

So happy snapping everyone. Good luck!

Took this picture on the way to the office this morning of a bottle of BASHAH, the beer I’m going to be reviewing tonight.

Check back later today for details of an exciting new BeerSweden competition which involves beer, cameras and beery prizes. More soon!