Best Notebooks & Tasting Journals for a Beer Geek

Beer journal drawings

The Best Beer Tasting Journals and Notebooks For Brewers and Beer Lovers

I have gathered what I believe are the best beer notebooks and tasting journals for a beer geek. Not just beer gifts for men, but a gift for a great note-taker who likes to have a beer.

Maybe you’re looking for a good gift for beer lovers or you’re a home brewer looking for a proper home brewing recipe journal. Or you want to save your notes about your beer and just want a new beer journal for yourself, I made this post for you.

While most people use Untappd for their beer journaling and tasting notes, putting pen to paper is still a thing us beer geeks do. In fact, we can do both. We’re multi-talented with our drinking and beer notes that way.

You can get really simple with your journal and have something for just writing down basic beer stats, or you can do some advanced sketch-notes like the one pictured at the top by Catherine Madden.

BTW, If you purchase through the links posted below, I may receive compensation (key word MAY). Let’s take a look at the notebooks and journals that are beer-worthy:

Best Self Project Action Pad

The Best Self Project Action Plan pad, is for when you plan to drink beer and relax.

This is perfect for a home or pro brewer along with a pro home drinker that wants to document. It may not be specially made for a beer person, but it definitely can be adopted by one.

There is also the Best Self 13 Week Productivity Journal – for the long range brewing goals.

There are a ton of great notebook options and card prompts at Best Self.

The Leuchtturm 1917 Medium A5

This one has no particular beer things within. It is just a really solid notebook that you can make however you want to. Plenty of open (but ruled) notebook space to create and document all the beers or brewing notes your buzzed little heart desires.

It has two bookmarks and that 150 gsm paper – which just means ink won’t bleed through to the next page. I use this one for my Craft Beer podcast and it performs well.

There are 31 writable lines per page. And it’s durable. Slightly larger than a normal Moleskin style usually is.

It is running around $25.00, but check it on Amazon right now, to make sure.

Beer Drop

The Moleskine Beer Journal

This is part of Moleskine’s “Passion” series of notebooks. Moleskine is my favorite brand of notebook to use, it would make sense to get this Moleskine Beer Journal:

Moleskine Beer Journal

It says on Amazon there is only six left. Not sure if that is a ploy to get you to buy it and then as soon as you do there is still magically one again. They don’t seem to be producing it anymore so this may be a collector’s item.

This is the one I would use for a beer diary. It MIGHT be too collectible to use (I am a nerd). I use a straight-up Moleskine notebook for my beer diary or beer brewing notes (if I were to get into brewing someday).

It has popped up on Bookshop.org too, but it comes and goes.

FEATURES:

  • Beer-themed shapes embossed on its cover.
  • Traditional Moleskine stickers but with a beer theme.
  • Five themed sections for tasting notes.
  • Section for notes about the place you purchased your beer.
  • Glossary for beer tips.
  • Has 240 pages and is large format size 5 x 8.25 inches.

The price in the past has been $20 to $25. But if it’s becoming this rare, that price is probably a steal now. At the time I am writing this it is $29.00 on Amazon.

I got one as a gift and opened it on my YouTube channel:

Using a simple blank Moleskine can work too if you like to set-up things yourself. Find a template that works for you and copy it.

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How To Cleanse Your Palate For Beer Tasting

Premium crackers, Daisy Cutter Pale, Pure Project hazy, Moose Drool Brown Ale
Crackers & beer: it’s a thing

You’re having a flight of beers, or you are at a beer festival, or bottle share, maybe you do your drinking from the kitchen table, or are busy sweeping an Untappd board.

Whatever the hell it is, you’re going through a lot of beers.

But you want to taste the next beer as genuine as you can. The cleanest way. I am here to try and help.

These are MY real-world picks, not generic trash results I got off the Internet.

How to cleanse your palate between beers

  • Crackers. Unsalted crackers are the best but salted still work.
  • Chips. This works for when you are out in the field drinking. Most places don’t have crsckers but they have chips.
  • Nuts. Mostly a tip for when you are in a bar or at home. Not that practical anywhere else.
  • Water. Super boring option and not the best way to reset your palate, but usually there is some around and you should be drinking some anyway.
  • Your hand. What the hell!? Your hand!? Yes. Give your hand a good lick. Taste that hand – you know where it has been, it’s fine. Almost give it a hickey even. This is the best option when there is nothing around and by the way, I do it often.
  • A different style. If you are stringing a bunch of IPAs together it’s a good idea to break it up with a Stout or Brown or something. You would be surprised how improved a hoppy beer can be, drinking one after an opposite style.

Again, these are all ones I do myself. If there is science behind this, it’s unintentional.

Resetting your palate before a different beer is something I highly recommend though.

Non-beer geeks (and even some actual beer geeks) might scoff at you. Let them. Be sad for them. They just don’t know. But now you do.

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (what the Internet thinks)

a sixpack of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale bottles
Sierra Pale Ale, there is nothing more important

This is an appreciation post for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I feel like I can’t have a beer geeky blog without more acknowledgment of the greatest of all time Pale Ale.

Yes, to many of us Sierra may taste outdated. But it is the greatest “outdated” taste of all time and the best palate-reset beer in the business.

And as we are about to see, as Craft Beer goes, so goes Sierra.

Sierra Pale is a great barometer for how beer/Craft Beer is going. Just look at the search volume for Sierra and it totally goes along with how popular Craft Beer has been in the past fifteen years

Search volume for Sierra Nevada Pale

Yes, you read that chart right, we are at our lowest level of the Internet searching for things related to Sierra Nevada Pale. What a sad world we live in.

What is everyone asking the Internet about Sierra Nevada Pale? These are the top searches:

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Does Beer Clean Your System?

A clear beer from Level Brewing to clean the system
This Level Brewing beer should clear things up

It sure seems like drinking beer cleans your system because the morning after a round of Hazy IPAs can be brutal. It feels like you must have cleared out everything.

It makes sense that it feels a night of alcohol poisoning heavy beer drinking, would purge your system of whatever weak ass crap that is hiding out in your body.

Does beer clean your system?

The boiled down answer is no, it does not clean your system. Probably not how you feel like it does anyway. But, there is some cleaning that I will look at in a bit.

Drinking beer (or any alcohol for that matter) will take water from your system. It will also make your kidneys work harder because you are dehydrating yourself with the boozing.

So all the things being “cleansed” from your body are mostly the byproduct of being dehydrated.

You are making your body work its butt off to get back to where it was prior to drinking. So it feels like you are cleansing in some weird way. But really you are just hungover.

Why Does Beer Dehydrate You When It’s Mostly Water?!

The effects of alcohol, whether it’s drinking beer (or whatever other booze you damn well fancy) for some messed up reason, makes you pee a lot.

Yes, I know what you are thinking right now “Well of course it does, you damn beer blogging idiot, it is liquid!”

Yeah well, get this weird fact I never knew, the alcohol in beer makes you PEE EVEN MORE THAN THE AMOUNT OF BEER YOU DRANK!

I guess that is the dehydrate part. (duh, Mike)

Continue reading “Does Beer Clean Your System?” →