The Beer Wench

There is nothing worse than going to an amazing beer bar, drinking ridiculously extraordinary beers … and NOT being able to blog about it because intoxication and memory loss usually ensues consumption.

In the past, I brought a notepad with tasting & rating sheets to bars. More often then not, the sheets got ruined and/or lost. Eventually, I stopped.

I usually regret not being able capture my beer drinking adventures in writing, especially when I get the opportunity to taste super obscure and limited release beers.

But have no fear, my friends. There is a solution to my problem.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s SUPER I-Phone.

Ok. I understand that not everyone has the same sentiment that I do for Apple. But regardless of your stance on the iPhone, I guarantee that the iPhone Beer Pad application will impress you.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

Beer Pad is the iPhone app for the fine beer aficionado. Once you install Beer Pad, you will always have your beer notes with you; right on your iPhone. Beer Pad goes beyond a paper notebook full of tasting notes.

With Beer Pad you can:
- Record the beer name, price, rating, color, carbonation, aroma, finish and your personal comments
- Use pre-populated lists of category descriptions such as style, brewery, region and pairing for easy cataloging
- Rate the beers you try
- Take a picture of the beer bottle or use a picture from your photo library for future reference

Beer Pad will also:
- Remember the beers that you really liked
- Let you browse your favorite beers by style, brewery, region and pairing
- Help you search through your long lists of tasting notes with an advanced search feature
- Help you further your personal beer experience

Beer Pad costs $4.99 and, in my opinion, it is totally worth it.

At this moment, I only have tasting notes on 4 beers saved. Typically, I get too consumed by the excitement of tasting and drinking cool beers and completely forget about using the Beer Pad application.

The other night, I finally remembered to use it. My first experience using Beer Pad was at Red Light Red Light, dubbed the 4th best beer bar in the world by Rate Beer. My fellow beer geeks and I were sitting around tasting several interesting and hard to find beers. I remembered Beer Pad and whipped it out to show my friends. Like me, they were pretty impressed and they helped collaborate on some beer notes.

The creators of Beer Pad have developed similar applications for other beverages, such as wine and whiskey.

My only gripe about Beer Pad is actually not a fault of the application itself, but of the iPhone. Beer Pad allows you to download images, which is really great. BUT, the iPhone does not have a flash and images taken by it in bars (which are typically very dark) usually do not come out.

I look forward to using my notes from Beer Pad for future blog posts.

If you have an iPhone and love beer, this application (or one of its siblings) may be of interest to you.

Cheers!!!