The Bottle You Can't Read
You're in Seoul and you've just bought three bottles of makgeolli from a small producer in Insadong — handwritten labels in Korean, no English text. The name, the brewery, the production date, and the expiry date are all on the label. None of it is accessible to you in two weeks when you're trying to remember which bottle was the unfiltered nuruk with the sharp medicinal finish and which was the sweeter commercial-style one.
Three fields solve this: name, name_Language (ISO code: ko), name_eng. Enter what's on the label in the original script in the first field, record the language code, and add your best transliteration or translation in the English field. The same pattern repeats for brewery name and place purchased. Six fields total — three for each of two key identifiers — let the database be searchable in either language across a collection that spans Korean, Belgian, Czech, and Japanese producers.
Date Bottled and Date Expired: The Freshness Axis
Makgeolli is a live fermented beverage. It continues fermenting in the bottle. The production date and expiry date printed on a Korean makgeolli label are not decorative — the drink at day 7 post-bottling is genuinely different from the same product at day 25. Carbonation levels, sweetness, and alcohol content all shift as the remaining yeast works through the residual sugars.
Date Bottled and Date Expired, paired with Date Tasted, give the context for every tasting note in the record. A taste_Aroma of "strong lactic, farmyard, yeasty" on a bottle tasted two days before expiry is completely consistent with an "apple, banana, sweet cream" on the same product tasted on day 5. Without the date context, those two notes appear contradictory. With it, they document a predictable fermentation arc.
For beer with a best-before date and for wine with a vintage, the same logic applies at longer timescales. The bottle and label image fields capture what was on the label at the time of purchase, including the bottling code or vintage — information that fades from memory faster than the tasting impression.
Five-Axis Evaluation Without a Scoring System
Appearance, Aroma, Taste, Body, Aftertaste — five free-text evaluation fields, each capturing a separate sensory axis. No numbers, no stars, no forced rating scale. The score is in a separate text field (taste_Score), left intentionally undefined so the user applies whatever scoring system they prefer: 100-point, 5-star, letter grade, or none.
Separating the axes matters because the dimensions don't always move together. A Korean sikhye-style makgeolli can have brilliant clarity and appealing appearance but thin body and no aftertaste — a pleasant but simple drink. A Belgian lambic can have a hazy orange-brown appearance that looks problematic but a complex sour aroma, tart acidic taste, medium-light body, and a long citrus-funk finish that rewards patience. Appearance alone predicts nothing.
Aftertaste is the field most reviewers shortchange. For makgeolli, the finish tells you whether the nuruk was high quality: clean fermentation leaves a short, dry finish; stale or poorly managed fermentation leaves a bitterness that lingers on the back palate for twenty minutes. That detail belongs in the record.
The barcode field scans the bottle's commercial barcode where one exists, providing a machine-readable cross-reference for future searches. The refURL stores the brewery's website or a relevant review page — the source the taster consulted for production background or technical detail.