Ticking is the practice of recording every distinct beer tried. It sounds like completionism for its own sake until you've been doing it for a year and can tell your own palate patterns with specificity: you consistently rate West Coast IPAs higher than East Coast IPAs of equivalent technical quality, you have an unusually high tolerance for Bitter when it's paired with strong Citrus Fruit, and Belgian-style collaborations almost always underperform solo-brewery releases in your Quick Rating. None of that is visible without the dataset.
The Flavor Cartography
Burnt, Toffee, Malty, Herbal, Spicy, Floral, Hoppy, Citrus Fruit, Dark Fruit are the flavor dimension fields — each scored on a consistent scale rather than described in text. This is the field architecture that makes the database analytically useful rather than just a personal diary. A text note saying "quite hoppy with citrus" isn't queryable. A Hoppy score of 4 with a Citrus Fruit score of 4 on a Beer Style of West Coast IPA is a data point in a distribution you can plot.
Bitter, Sour, Sweet, Dry, Body, and Linger are the sensory intensity fields. Linger is the one that's most consistently underlogged in beer tasting systems and most useful in retrospect — it's the field that captures whether a beer is memorable 30 minutes after finishing it. A high Linger score on a beer with otherwise modest scores suggests a complexity that the immediate tasting evaluation doesn't fully capture. A beer with excellent scores on Hoppy and Citrus Fruit but negligible Linger is a session beer regardless of ABV.
Collaboration Tracking
Collab Brewery is the field that makes this database handle the modern craft beer market accurately. Collaboration releases between two or more breweries now represent a significant percentage of limited releases and festival beers. A collaboration between a sour-specialist brewery and a barrel-aged stout specialist produces something neither would make alone, and attributing the flavour profile to just Brewery misses the production origin.
State adds the geographic dimension. American craft beer has strong regional flavor traditions — Pacific Northwest IPAs, New England NEIPAs, California farmhouse ales, Midwest lagers with German heritage influence. The State field lets you analyze whether your palate scores actually track those regional distinctions or whether that's received wisdom you're carrying without personal evidence.
The Record That Shapes the Next Purchase
Serving Style is the field that accounts for the variability that comes from how the beer was served rather than how it was brewed. A cask ale and the same beer on keg at standard serving temperature produce different flavor presentations — different Floral prominence, different Bitter intensity, different carbonation-driven Body perception. Logging serving style means a beer you rated low in one format can be revisited in another without conflating the two evaluations.
Book is the organizational reference to whichever ticking guide or festival programme the beer came from — a CAMRA Good Beer Guide regional listing, a beer festival programme, a BJCP competition entry. It places the tick in its discovery context, which is useful when you're working through a specific guide systematically.
Quick Rating is the overall number. Everything else is the explanation for why that number is what it is, and what flavour experiences will likely produce a similar number in future purchases.