The Tick

Beer ticking is not beer reviewing. The reviewer writes a thousand words about mouthfeel and finish. The ticker writes a tick. The purpose is the count — the systematic accumulation of unique beers encountered for the first time, documented in the moment, never duplicated. Once a beer is ticked, it's ticked. You don't re-tick the same beer at a different pub three months later.

What the database needs is exactly what this template provides: was this beer here before? Beer Name + Brewery is the deduplication key. When you're standing at the bar at the Great British Beer Festival, pint in hand, third session of the day, you should not have to remember whether you've already had this particular Harvey's Sussex Best from Lewes. The database remembers.

The Pump Clip Field Is the Point

A pump clip is the badge on the hand pump handle — the brewery's artwork, the beer's name, the ABV, sometimes a cartoon or a landscape or a shield. Pump clips are genuinely collectible objects in British pub culture. Some tickers take the clip off the pump and keep it. Most photograph it.

The Pump Clip image field makes the database visual. Five hundred ticked beers is a list. Five hundred ticked beers each with its pump clip photo is a visual archive of the range of British craft brewing across a decade of pub visits. The image also serves as the ground truth for ambiguous names: several breweries have beers called "Golden Ale" or "Best Bitter," and the clip distinguishes them unambiguously when memory is fuzzy.

Country as the Geography of Beer

Country tracks the origin beyond just brewery name. Most tickers work primarily in the UK — England, Scotland, Wales — but the field handles Belgian trappists, German seasonal imports, American craft can finds at specialist bottle shops. Over time, Country distribution shows where the ticker's actual exposure lies.

ABV as a double field allows for 3.8%, 4.2%, 6.5% — the full decimal precision that appears on the clip and in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide. Strong ales above 7.5% cluster at certain pub types (Belgian bars, specialist off-licences). Session bitters below 4% cluster at free houses and micropubs. ABV pattern by Location tells you which venues are introducing you to the extremes of the strength range.

Date and Location together are the tick's provenance. "Harvey's Sussex Best — The Lewes Arms, Lewes, East Sussex, 14 March 2019" is what a tick actually is. The date-location pair is immutable once entered — it represents a real moment at a real place. When you have four hundred ticks with dates, the timeline of your beer geography becomes readable: the summer run through Yorkshire free houses, the London trip that added twelve Bermondsey breweries in a weekend, the GBBF blocks that stack up in August.

Rating out of 5 is the honest assessment. Notes is the brief sensory tag: "dry-hopped, floral, served slightly warm, excellent condition." Neither field is mandatory — a quick tick in a loud pub might have no rating and no notes, just the name, the brewery, and the date. The record is still valid. The tick happened.