BS-Brewing's Craft-Beer Journal

Across the country, these are boon times for drinking craft beer: Coffee-flavored stouts and freshly hopped ales are now as commonplace as Bud.

But with this abundance of quality beer, a new problem has emerged: Remembering all the great brews we drank last night.

To help eliminate any cognitive gaps, Portland, Oregon-based home-brewing and "extreme eating" collective BS Brewing recently released 33 Beers, a pocket-size beer journal and your ticket to total taste recall.

Unlike a tattered napkin or your clammy palm, this notebook ($4) is ideal for inscribing beer-geek minutiae. With a few scribbles and check marks, you can record a brew's serving vessel, IBU and ABV.

But 33 Beers' genius lies in its flavor wheel. Instead of relying on drinkers to jot down descriptors–ever read your handwriting after downing three beers?–the notebook arranges the most common attributes (floral, malty, sour) in a circle. Plot these characteristics on a scale of 1 to 5, and you'll create a quick visual summary.

Rating a beer will take you a minute; we wish we could say the same about that hangover.