Keeping Track of Craft Beer Drinking – Brew in Review

Craft beer is a serious hobby, but, at a point, it becomes difficult to keep track of everything.

To me, the craft beer hobby comes down to striving for two things:

• Trying new things (constantly)
• Coming back to some new old favourites from time to time

Keeping track of all the great beer you’ve had can be difficult, remembering what you’ve liked, what you haven’t, reliving the memories… All the keeping track can create other craft beer related hobbies. Keeping up with keeping track of craft beer drinking is half the fun.

Keeping track is also a great way to get involved in the craft beer community, and I highly recommend partaking in some of these craft beer sub-hobbies.

Untappd:

While there are some dangers and problems with Untappd, it’s still a great tool for keeping track. It’s nice to see what your friends are drinking and easily compare thoughts on a particular beer.

The other interesting thing with Untappd is coming back to a beer after not drinking it for awhile, especially if you can’t remember how you felt about it the first time. Whether it be the beer is more/less appropriate for the time, or tastes have simply changed, coming back to a beer can result in a different rating.

Bottle Cap Collecting:

With a lot of beer drinking comes a lot of bottle caps.

While it may make you look like a bit of an alcoholic, collecting the bottle caps to relive the memories can be a bit of fun. This one’s relatively new and right now I’m slowly filling up a brandy glass. Hopefully this will turn into a larger vessel soon, but there are other great options including magnets, coffee tables, and general art.

Spreadsheets:

Probably the driest way to do things but it’s still a great way to keep track of things, especially if you really want to nerd out.

My current spreadsheet is cross-referenced by style and brewery which allows me to see not only how many beers of had of a particular style/brewery, but also to see where my leanings are in terms of style.

Spreadsheets aren’t for everybody of course!

Pictures:

Since everyone has a camera in their phone nowadays, pictures are easy to take of every beer drinking experience! Sharing these pictures are just as fun and a tool like Instagram is perfect for this.

Of course Instagram is a fun place to look at other people’s beerporn too.

Adding to this, photography is a really cool hobby, and having a specific subject matter really helps keep up with it and improve.

Blogging:

The main reason this website came to fruition was just as another beer related hobby.

Regardless of capabilities in writing, writing about beer is a hell of a lot of fun, helps to keep track, and also helps to refine tastes in beer. Setting up a website is really easy these days as well, so I’d suggest go for it!

And anything else:

Well, that’s what I’m doing…

Craft beer is a great hobby, and that hobby can be as big or little as you want it to be. I’m always after new ways to keep track, so feel free to comment. If I take up the hobby I’ll add it to this post!

-Chas