I got an envelope from Dave Selden of Portland, Oregon right after the end of the end of the photo contest. In it there was a real letter on real letterhead and two copies of the booklet 33 Bottles of Beer. I should have been a lesson to me as I still haven't mailed out the three prizes I was supposed to send - sorry Rob, Bill and Zak. I emailed them again saying how sorry I was for the delay. I may have to do that again between now and March.
But enough about me. Except for this. I don't go to fests really all that much. And I don't rate beers other than what I write about them here. So you would think that a little booklet for rating beer in a setting like a beer fest would be a snoozer for me. Wrong. This is one of the best made, well organized, function appropriate objects I have ever seen. It is a can opener in an age when there were no can openers. It is a shoe to those who never had shoes. It fits in your palm. It has a hefty paper cover. It has information on the inside cover. It has 33 identical pages of space allowing you to rate 33 beers. That's what the book is called, too. And the website.
The format of the rating page includes a little diagram of a spoked wheel. It has 16 spokes leading out to where 16 characteristics of beer are named - like linger, sour, toffee, floral. Along each spoke there are five points for the intensity of each characteristic to be noted. There is also space for text notes, numerical ranks of IBUs and ABVs not to mention a five star rating spot. A ticker's dream. I guess. Because I don't tick. But I can guess.
Plus it's only four bucks. Buy a stack, fill your rec room with shelves of them after you fill them. Handy and dandy. Heck, buy one if you are a ticker and let me know if it is as useful as I think it would be.