Trust
Who writes and reviews KnownAlcohol
Who currently reviews
No reviewers are appointed yet
KnownAlcohol has no named reviewers at present. Rather than publish invented credentials, a page that needs a reviewer says so plainly and is not published. If you hold one of the qualifications below and would review in that scope, get in touch.
The reviewer roles
Each role is defined by the scope it covers and the qualification it requires. A person approved for one scope is not thereby approved for another: a lawyer who checks a licensing rule has said nothing about whether a still is safe.
| Role | Scope | Qualification required | Conflicts | Valid for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legal reviewer | Jurisdictional alcohol law, label rules, appellation and protected terms, licensing. | Admitted to practise, or a named regulatory compliance role, in the jurisdiction reviewed. | Disclosure required | 1 year |
| Production safety reviewer | Fermentation, carbonation, pressure, sanitation, chemical handling, and the legal boundary on distillation. | Professional brewing, winemaking, or distilling qualification, or a process safety credential. | Disclosure required | 2 years |
| Sensory reviewer | Tasting method, fault identification, panel calibration, descriptive vocabulary. | A recognised sensory qualification, and named panel or judging experience. | Disclosure required | 3 years |
| Recipe reviewer | Measures, units, yield, technique, dilution, glassware, and strength context on cocktail pages. | Professional bartending or beverage development experience, named. | Not required | 3 years |
| Public health reviewer | Impairment, standard drinks, poisoning, withdrawal, pregnancy, interactions, support navigation. | A clinical or public health credential relevant to alcohol. | Disclosure required | 1 year |
| Nutrition reviewer | Energy content, macronutrients, and dietary context. Never a health benefit claim. | A registered dietitian or equivalent credential. | Disclosure required | 2 years |
| Responsible use reviewer | Service limits, adult audience boundary, harm reduction framing, and the no-clearance rule. | A named role in alcohol harm reduction, responsible service training, or licensing. | Disclosure required | 1 year |
What a badge requires
A review badge is not a decoration and it is not a general endorsement of the site. It says that one named person with a checkable qualification approved one page, inside a stated scope, on a stated date. All of the following must be present, and the reviewer must also appear on the site's own list of approved reviewers, not only in our records, so a record on its own cannot mint a byline.
| What is recorded | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|
| Who reviewed it | A real, named person. Not a title, not a team, not "our experts". |
| The role they reviewed under | Which of the roles above they reviewed under. |
| Their qualification | The specific credential, so a reader can judge its weight rather than trust the word expert. |
| What they checked | What they actually checked. A review outside its scope is not a review. |
| When they checked it | When they checked it, because a review ages like any other verification. |
| The outcome | The outcome, from the table below. Only one of them publishes a badge. |
| Status | Badge |
|---|---|
| Reviewed | Badge shown |
| Review pending | No badge. The page shows a review pending notice instead. |
| Review expired | No badge. The page shows a review pending notice instead. |
| Changes requested | No badge. The page shows a review pending notice instead. |
Which pages cannot publish without one
Review is not requested page by page. It is attached to the kind of page, so two pages of the same kind cannot be held to different standards depending on who wrote them. These are the kinds that do not go up without a named reviewer:
- How it is made /production/
- Responsible use /responsible-drinking/
- Law and labelling /laws-labels/
- Calculators /tools/
Everything else may publish without review, and says so rather than implying an approval it does not have.
Reviews expire
A review is a statement about a page as it stood on a date, and both the page and the field move. Law and public health reviews last a year because the underlying rules and guidance are revised on that cycle; sensory and recipe reviews last three, because a technique does not change on a legislative timetable.
An expired review reverts the page to pending rather than quietly standing. That happens without anyone noticing the expiry, which is the point: the failure mode being designed against is the badge nobody thought to recheck.
Why the roster is empty
It would take five minutes to write plausible names and credentials onto this page, and the site would look considerably more authoritative for it. That is exactly why we do not.
A fabricated reviewer is not a small dishonesty on a trust page. It is the one failure that would make every other claim on the site worthless, because the whole argument here is that a check either ran or it did not. So the roster is empty, the pages that need a reviewer say so and are not published, and the standard is set out in advance rather than written to fit whoever eventually agrees.
The standard for product claims
The same rule governs why there are no bottle scores, rankings, or awards here. A claim about a specific product requires retained evidence that the product was actually in somebody's hands, recorded before the claim is made:
- The record that ties the claim to the bottle
- When it was obtained
- Bought, sample, or press, disclosed either way
- Batch or lot, because bottlings differ
- When it was actually tasted
- Glass, temperature, blind or not
- Which named person tasted it
- The published method they followed
- Any relationship with the producer
Until that evidence exists for a given bottle, the site covers categories, styles, methods, and verified product facts, and publishes no score for it. A rating without this record is a guess wearing a number.
Offering to review
If you hold one of the qualifications above and would review in that scope, get in touch with your credential and the scope you would take. We will not add a badge without something checkable, so a review offer needs a credential we can verify rather than a description of one.
Reviewing here means reading a specific page against your own field and saying whether it holds, with your name and the date attached to that judgement. It does not mean endorsing the site.