Tracking Your Beer
No, not this kind of tracking your beer.
Ever since I found myself turning into a beer nut, I’ve tried to keep a running tally of what I’m drinking. Not necessarily to properly review everything I drink, but at least keep track of what I’m drinking, where, and how often. Blame it on a geeky collector’s mentality or a bit of OCD, but it’s nice to be able to look at a list and see all the different brews I’ve tried.
Someone looking at a list of dozens hundreds of beers may question the effect on my wallet or my liver, but that’s a whole different column.
I’ve tracked my habits in a couple different ways over the years.
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The Word Document / Excel Spreadsheet
This was my first method, back when I was a new craft beer devotee - a simple word document. Basically, I’d enter the beer by name each time I tried something new. It was easy enough when I started drinking, since I had a system that basically limited me to two new beers a week. Buy a six-pack and a bomber at the grocery store, drink a bottle from the six pack each night of the week, and have the bomber on Sunday. Rinse, repeat.
I created what I thought were clever annotations (‘+’ and ‘-’ for really good or really bad picks, x2 if I had something twice, etc), and added the beers as I went. The problem, after a couple weeks, was organization. Was that a special release or a year-round beer? What style was it? Where does the brewery name end and the beer name begin? All that, plus the fact that everything was listed by date rather than brewery, which made it tough to sort through.
Eventually, I transitioned to a sortable spreadsheet. This solved a lot of organization issues, but still involved a lot of legwork entering beers, breweries, styles, ABV, and all the other geeky stuff we love.
RateBeer.com and Other Rating Sites
Discovering RateBeer was revelatory. Here, all the beers – and all the relevant statistics – were already in place! Cataloging my drinking became a simple matter of searching for a beer and plugging in a review. Not only that, but I didn’t need to annotate my likes or dislikes, as there was a rating system built right in.
After a couple happy years using the site as a resource, issues with using it as a drinking time capsule (at least for my purposes) began to show. Other than editing my prior reviews, it isn’t a great place to keep track of my drinking something multiple times.
On top of that, there’s my occasional dalliances with other review sites. I won’t link to ‘em from here, but we all know that RateBeer isn’t the only beer site in town. There’s others out there, many with big communities or slick sites. For a time, I was reviewing every beer I had, but my reviews were spread across a half-dozen sites.
So RateBeer as a beer database? Fantastic. As a source for reviews and community consensus on beer? Unmatched. The way I’d like to track my beer drinking? Close, but no cigar.
Untappd.com
Only time will tell if it’s true love or another dalliance, but a few weeks back I started checking out Untappd.com. Untappd is a “mobile web app that allows you to socially share the brew you’re currently enjoying, as well as where you’re enjoying it, with friends.” Think FourSquare for beer. There’s a location element to it – you can ‘check in’ to the bar where you’re drinking – but the app seems more focused on what’s in your glass then where it is. They’ve got a nifty database of beer, and you can ‘check in’ the same beer multiple times.
So far, it seems pretty well tailored to my needs. I can make notes on my beer (not exactly a full review, but better than my +/- scale), and it lets me easily track drinking the same beer multiple times. The interface seems slick enough that it can be navigated after a few beers, and it’s tailor-made to operate on my iPod (or your iPhone, or Droid, or Palm…)
That transportability, however, is also the program’s biggest hurdle. There’s no way to update from your home computer, even if you navigate to Untappd’s mobile site from your PC – you’ve got to use your mobile device. I like drinking out with my buddies, but the bulk of my beer drinkin’ is done at home. It’s a pain to use a handheld device, especially to type in notes, when my computer is in the same room.
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Have you tried any of the above methods? How do you keep track of all the beer you’ve had? Do you even bother?
12 Comments to “Tracking Your Beer”
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I use Untappd, for the social reasons, but in terms of tracking beers, I use it to make sure I have remembered to add all my beers to my spreadsheet. My speadsheet captures brewery, name, type, rating (keep on stock, drink again, glad I tried it and would not drink again) year drank and whether bottle, draft or growler. I save it to Dropbox so I can access from home pc (data entry) or from mobile (when in beer store or bar). When I know I am going beer shopping I will even printout spreadsheet and bring with me. Seems like there is potential for someone to build an app based on these needs!
I use an iPhone app called BeerPad. It goes by a five-star rating system and has all kinds of room for tasting notes and commentary. One other cool thing is there’s space for a photo so you can either download a pic or take a picture of the bottle and/or glass. Then you have an illustrated log and helps you recognize a beer you had way back. I’ve been using this app exclusively for over two years and I’ve built up a really good data base.
I use BeerPad as well as Untappd. It is a lot of work to keep BeerPad updated but worth it. I doubt Untappd will ever replace it for me but I am enjoying seeing what my other friends are drinking.
I use Bento, which is a personal dbase program from the Filemaker folks (only avail on Mac, not PC). It’s entirely customizable, can link to websites, etc. It’s obviously not beer-specific, but you can make your template any way you want.
For most people, I think it’s probably impossible to find something that meets all their needs without designing their own database (which is beyond my capability). RateBeer, and the others, are first and foremost review sites so are unlikely to be perfect for those who simply want to keep a record of what they have drunk (and where) and maybe add a score without going to the trouble of writing a review. The main shortcoming of RateBeer from my perspective (and it’s my failing not RateBeer’s) is that I’m happier drinking beer than typing, so I always have a big backlog. And, of course, as with any website, there’s no guarantee it’s going to be there for ever. And there are beers that I’ve had (and written notes on) over the years which are not “rateable” for one reason of another – usually that I drunk them years ago and production ceased before RateBeer was in existence. So I keep a spreadsheet too. All rather cumbersome but I doubt I’ll ever find a perfect solution.
Check out Pintley.com – also iPhone app and Android app in dev – as this site and app combination makes it much easier to do the simple and quick tracking of beers. You can simply rate via stars or add your own tasting notes. It is in Beta and taking its time to transition as a better web+app platform. Its brewery pages are a nice welcome to beer searching and tracking. The Recommendations engine is tuning up just fine. Give it a try – it will be a surprise when it goes final.
I use the iPhone NOtes app. sync’d t GMail. Just write it in and uses “yes”, “no” and “~”. “~” is I’d drink it again but wouldn’t go out of my way to buy it.
Not sophisticated but it works for me and keeping it sync’d with GMail notes is a handy backup.
All of these methods are pretty cool…but don’t forget the advantage / benefit of RateBeer…you get to help out the ‘rest of us’ who are less OCD with ‘what beer to drink’ which is a great assist….the problem with ALL these methods is that it takes away time from drinking for typing…like now…which reminds me…WHERE is that beer, anyway? Cheers!!
i use an android app called Beer+ (made by a company named metospher). it sounds a lot like the beerpad app others were talking about. you can rate (5 star) beers, write a note and now they have broken out sections for taste, feel, color, etc… you can also take pictures like some of the others said and scan barcodes to search for a beer(and add to a database if the barcode did not exist). i think you might have to pay for it now, but i got it when it was new so it was free. i wouldn’t hesitate to pay for it though. usually if i’m out i will type the name a rating some quick notes then update the rest (style, alc%, brewer etc..) later.
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