Lost Brew
20-oz Lost Coast Ale on the Marin County coast, California
"Lost Brew" was originally thought to have been taken on a 1970 trip O'Dowd made to Northern California. However, subsequent investigation discovered that it was an elaborate and cleverly conceived forgery. The work was not created by O'Dowd at all, but rather by Cletus "Buck" McGinley, one of the lesser lights of the beer photography movement. McGinley studied in O'Dowd's shadow for some time, but never approached O'Dowd's mastery of the art form.

Frustrated by years of laboring in oblivion, McGinley produced "Lost Brew" in 1988 and affixed O'Dowd's name to the work in hopes of validating his talent and achieving monetary remuneration by selling it to a gallery or museum. He did this successfully in 1991, pocketing a cool $250,000. Much of this windfall was spent on prostitutes and alcohol, and McGinley was last seen in a Nevada trailer park in 1995.

Ironically, O'Dowd never noticed that the work that achieved him so much renown was in fact not his at all. There is a perfectly understandable reason for this: in an 1997 interview with Art Historian magazine, O'Dowd estimated that, due to his frequent spells of inebriation during his career, he only remembered approximately one-third of the photo shoots that produced his outstanding oeuvre of beer portraits.