For many people craft beer is more than a tasty beverage, it is a hobby, and like any hobby there is all manner of accoutrements and accessories available to the interested fan. One item that has been growing in popularity as more people get serious about tasting and appreciating beer is the dedicated tasting notebook. We take a look at a few different commercial examples to find out which is the most useful.

There can be a stigma associated with taking notes on beer, but there is no denying that it is a useful tool. If you’re serious about tasting beer, taking notes is an important way to not only remember a beer’s traits but also to develop your skills as a taster. The  act of jotting down notes can help you process the sensory input from tasting a beer, and a collection of notes can be a valuable resource for remembering that amazing stout you had that one time.

You don’t need a dedicated beer journal to start taking tasting notes, but many examples have helpful templates that can guide your note-taking and even improve your tasting abilities as they prompt you for specific information. Let’s take a look at three different commercial notebooks that I’ve used and evaluated.

The Beer Journal

Price & Availability: about $10 on Amazon

Chris Wright’s The Beer Journal is a hard-bound book that combines a basic guide to beer with dedicated tasting pages. It’s an attractive package that feels like something you’d find on a table of gift suggestions at a major book store. There are specific layouts – with helpful explanations on how to fill them out- for detailed tasting logs, shorter festival tasting notes, and even food+beer pairing notes.

Unfortunately the form of the journal impacts its intended function too much, and the combination of a hard cover, glossy pages, and a tight binding make it too difficult to actually use comfortably.

What We Like:

• The quality of the journal. It is nicely laid-out and filled with great, full-color pictures.
• The guide to beer styles is a useful collection of basic stats on the styles, and it matches the BJCP style naming conventions
• Space for detailed tasting notes on over 80 beers

What We Don’t Like:

• The combination of size, binding, and heavy-duty cover make for an unwieldy journal that we couldn’t see ourselves carrying to tastings or events.
• The pages are very glossy and the feel for writing in the book is not great.
• The style-guide and extra information on beers and tastings may be redundant to more knowledgable beer drinkers.

Who It’s Good For:

• It would make a great primer for some someone just starting off on their craft beer journey.

Moleskine Passions Journal – Beer

Price & Availability: about $15 on Amazon

Moleskine, who makes the favorite little black notebooks of hipsters, writers, and supposedly Hemingway, has a line of Passion Journals each tailored to a specific hobby from wine to gardening to beer. The beer version is the size of their standard large notebooks (8″x5″) and has all the common features you expect in the high-quality notebooks (elastic strap, acid-free pages, and a rear accordion pocket.) Unlike the standard Moleskine notebooks the passions journal is separated into tabbed sections. The first half of the journal is divided into five pre-labeled sections filled with well designed templates for Tastings, My Cellar, Recipes, My Addresses, and Homebrewing, and there are five additional blank tabbed sections in the journal’s second half (each with its own template layout).

What We Like:

• I’m a long-time Moleskine devotee, and I’m a bit of a sucker for their whole aesthetic. It is a classy product that is a joy to use.
• The sections are well designed and laid out and are quite flexible depending on your personal note-taking style.
• The pages dedicated to tasting notes are especially nice and include the “flavor wheel” and ample space for your notes.
• The included sheets of icon stickers are a creative way to add “tags” to your notes.
• The individual templates contained in the journal are available as a free download once you register on Moleskine.com’s community site.

Our Recommendation and Other Options

There are other commercial dedicated beer notebooks out there, but there is one more solution that might be the best for you: a plain notebook. As much as I love the 33 Bottles journals I find myself most-often recording notes in the same plain all-purpose notebook that I use for the majority of my notes. The tasting notes are often not as high-quality or detailed as I would get if I took them in a dedicated tasting journal, but I always have the notebook on me and reaching for it is habitual.

If you prefer digital note-taking there are even more options available to you from custom note-taking solutions like Evernote to dedicated beer smartphone apps like Untappd (our favorite). Of course you are never locked into a single method of note-taking, and my personal system is a hybrid of hand-written notes that get cataloged electronically (a subject for a future post).

Experiment with different styles and tools when taking notes on the beers you taste, and you will discover what works best for you. I’d recommend starting with a plain notebook if you are comfortable with taking notes as you taste beer, and if you need more guidance on the note-taking process pick up a few 33 Bottles of Beer notebooks.