Saving tasting notes and tea log.
So I’m new to actually writing down tasting notes, but now that I am doing so I’d like to be organized about it. Is anyone here saving their tasting notes anywhere apart from steepster?
If you are and have a system that works for you, please do share!
For now I am writing my notes on steepster and auto-archiving them to Evernote via IFTTT. This can also be made to work for archiving to Google Docs. If anyone is interested in doing this and needs some help getting it going, I’ll be happy to explain the steps involved. One catch, it only works for new tasting notes from when you set this up and not for older ones.
I also have a spreadsheet of my tea stash, and ideally I’d like to link that to the tasting notes. Just started thinking about this so I may come up with a better solution eventually.
I have my tasting notes on my website. I don’t entirely trust that Steepster will be around forever.
Agreed. Which is why I’m archiving my steepster notes. I enjoy the sharing of notes on here and the community feedback, but don’t really want to manually be saving the notes in two places.
I keep my notes in the same spreadsheet I use to organize my tea. This enables me to easily search by date, score, vendor, and tea (I only publish one review on steepster but try to record some notes on every tea I drink). I usually write it in the spreadsheet, and if I find the notes interesting enough, I paste it into steepster then clean up the grammar.
Dr Jim: probably a silly question but how do you go about fitting long notes into the spreadsheet? I’ve always found them tricky for long text entry. A description or if possible a screenshot, would be extremely helpful.
I use a lot of short-hand notation and am terse. I set the spreadsheet to wrap text and let the comment take up half the width of the screen. When I post to steepster I frequently expand the note. Here is an example of a typical note that I didn’t post to steepster and one that I did:
(10s): Nice nose has fruit and spice, and a bit of veggie. Rich round taste is sweet and slightly nutty: a cross between brown rice and nougat. 2nd (10s): Slight bitterness, especially in the long, powerful finish. Modest cha qi. 3rd (20s): A bit of ash in the taste. The sweet nougat isn’t entirely gone, but is hiding.
(10s): Teally fine nose. Rich and earthy. Good taste has layers of flavor. Sweet and fruity with hints of tobacco and straw. Flavor is all on the roof of the mouth, not the tongue. First steep was very fruity, and fairly complex but by the second steep the fruit was dominated by an excess of tannin (though not really bitterness), particularly in the finish. The fruit still appears occasionally, but the tannin dominates. Shortening the steeps helped rein in the tannin, as did waiting longer between steeps.
https://steepster.com/teas/chawang-shop/78657-2016-chawangpu-jinggu-you-shan-gushu
Another option, which I use a lot at work, is to not use the wrap text option. This only shows a small part of the note, but if you expand the edit box to about 10 lines you can show a lot of text there (more when you scroll). Since the spreadsheet is basically an archive, this works well. My other boxes are date, rating, maker, name, gms of tea, oz water, temp, Y/N sweetener, and the notes.
Thanks! Some helpful ideas there.
I think I need to just suppress the desire to have or create a perfect system and settle for something that works!
One thing that wasn’t explicit in what I said, but if you learn to use the data function the spreadsheet will become much more useful. I can with a couple of clicks show only the tasting notes from say Tea Urchin. A few more and I can select 4 different vendors. I can also show only teas that I own more than an ounce. Etc. etc.
I jot down quick notes as I drink using Google Keep. This helps me to write my Steepster reviews later. Also have Google Sheets spreadsheet with my tea inventory.
You can download all of your Steepster tasting notes from your rss feed (steepster.com/username/feed.rss). I do this periodically as Steepster is getting kinda creaky and could crash at any time.
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