Trust
How we research, source, and verify
The source hierarchy
Not every source can support every claim. The failure mode this prevents is the common one: a well written trade article says the minimum age in a country is nineteen, that sentence gets repeated across the web, and nobody goes back to the statute. So sources are sorted into classes, and the class decides what kind of fact the source is allowed to carry. Only the first three classes below may carry a legal claim, and the code enforces that rather than trusting the writer to remember it.
| Class | Legal claim | What it covers | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appellation or protected indication authority | Yes | Owns geographic and protected-term rules for its own designation only. | INAO, Consorzio, Scotch Whisky Regulations |
| Government regulator | Yes | The agency that writes or enforces the rule in the named jurisdiction. | TTB, HMRC, European Commission, State ABC board |
| Public health authority | No | Owns health risk, standard drink, and consumption guidance. Not a legal authority. | NIAAA, CDC, WHO, NHS |
| Statute or regulation text | Yes | The regulation, code section, or directive itself. | 27 CFR, EU Regulation 2019/787 |
| Peer reviewed research | No | Supports process, chemistry, and sensory claims. | Journal of the Institute of Brewing |
| Style or standards body | No | May own a sensory or production framework. Never replaces law. | BJCP, Brewers Association, OIV |
| Trade association | No | Useful for industry practice. Has an interest, so it is disclosed. | Distilled Spirits Council |
| Journalism | No | Background and history only. Never a current legal fact. | Trade press |
| Producer or brand | No | Can support a verified fact about its own product only, never a category rule. | Distillery technical sheet |
| Retailer or marketplace | No | Never a source for law, category definition, price, or availability claims. | none |
Two consequences of that table are worth stating plainly, because they are where most drinks writing goes wrong.
- A regulator is authoritative only inside its own jurisdiction. The TTB defines what may be called bourbon for United States federal purposes. It says nothing about what may be sold as whisky in India, and a page that used it that way would be wrong even though it cited a real regulator.
- A producer can confirm a fact about its own product and nothing more. A distillery sheet is good evidence of that distillery's mash bill. It is not evidence of what the category requires, because a producer has no authority to define the category and an obvious interest in how it is described.
What a legal fact must carry
A legal statement here is not just a sentence in an article. We will not publish one unless all of the following are recorded alongside it:
| What we record | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|
| Where it applies | Which country, state, or province the rule applies in. A rule with no jurisdiction is not a rule, and "general" or "worldwide" is rejected outright. |
| Who publishes it | The named body that publishes it, so a reader can go and check. |
| What kind of authority that is | Which class above the authority belongs to, which is what decides whether it may carry the claim at all. |
| The exact reference | The specific code section, regulation number, or document, not a link to a home page. |
| When it was last checked | The date somebody actually opened the source and read it. |
| The state of that check | The state of that check, from the table below. |
| What it does not cover | What the rule does not cover: the exceptions, the carve-outs, and the cases where it stops applying. |
A missing field is not a small gap
A legal claim missing any of the above is not softened, it is withheld. The page appears without the claim and says what was missing. This is deliberate: a rule stated without a jurisdiction and a date reads exactly as confidently as one that has both, and the reader has no way to tell them apart.
How long a verification lasts
Alcohol rules move at different speeds, so one site-wide freshness number would be wrong in both directions: too slow for tax, absurdly fast for a category definition that has not changed since 1938. Each legal topic has its own window, and when a verification passes it, the page reverts to an unverified state on its own and stops asserting the rule. Nobody has to notice.
| Window | Topics | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 180 days about 6 months |
Direct shipping and delivery, Excise and duty rates, Import allowance and duty | Money and movement. Rates, thresholds, and carrier rules are revised on ordinary budget and policy cycles. |
| 365 days 1 year |
Advertising and marketing rules, Distillation legality, Health guidance, Home brewing and winemaking legality, Legal purchase and drinking age, Licensed service rules, Mandatory label statements, Open container rules | Set by legislation and revised occasionally, but often enough that a two year old check is not good enough. |
| 730 days 2 years |
Appellation and protected terms, Legal category definitions | Definitional. These change rarely, and when they do it is a public, well signposted event. |
Anything without its own entry falls back to 365 days.
Verification states
A legal fact is always in exactly one of these states, and only the first one publishes.
| Status | Publishes | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Verified | Yes | Checked against the named authority on the date shown. |
| Verification required | No | This rule has not been checked against a primary authority yet. |
| Out of date | No | The last verification is older than this topic allows. |
| Superseded | No | The rule changed and the replacement has not been recorded. |
| Disputed | No | Authorities disagree, or the rule is under challenge. |
Note what disputed does. Where authorities genuinely disagree, the honest position is to say so and show both, not to pick the one that makes a cleaner sentence. That state exists so the site has somewhere to put a real disagreement instead of resolving it silently.
What we check before an entry goes up
These are not a checklist somebody remembers at the end of a long day. If an entry cannot meet the ones for its subject, we do not publish it.
- The adult audience policy, structurally and in its language.
- For a cocktail, a complete recipe: a yield, a serving count, a numeric measure and a unit on every ingredient, a method, glassware, ice, garnish, a dilution note, and a strength estimate. Missing one of those makes it an article about a drink, not a recipe.
- For a production page, all 7 hazard classes: fire, pressure, contamination, chemical, ventilation, material, legal.
- For a legal page, the seven fields above, a qualifying source class, and a current verification.
- A responsible use block appropriate to the subject.
- Specialist review where the topic requires it.
- A page you can actually read: a plain answer at the top, at least one figure or table, and prose broken up rather than run together in a wall.
- No statement anywhere on the page that a reader is unimpaired, under a limit, or able to drive.
Where a page cannot meet one of these we do not publish it, and where something is missing the page says so rather than filling the gap with a guess.
Where a calculator's answer comes from
Strength after dilution, standard drinks and blending results are calculated from stated inputs with a published formula. Every estimate shows the numbers that went in, the assumptions it made, and how uncertain the answer is. Dilution from shaking and stirring varies with ice, technique, and time, so a strength figure for a mixed drink is a range presented as a single number, and the page says so.
The one thing no calculation here will do
No estimate on this site will tell you that you are unimpaired, below a legal limit, or able to drive. Impairment depends on body composition, sex, age, liver function, medication, food, illness, hydration, sleep, and pace, and a web page can measure none of them. The refusal is built into the tools themselves, so one of them cannot produce such an answer at all. The responsible use policy sets out why.
What we tell a search engine
Alongside the words you read, we hand a search engine a short description of each entry, and ours describes only what is actually visible. We call something a recipe only when a complete measured recipe is printed on it, a set of steps only when the ordered steps are shown, and questions and answers only when the questions and answers are really there.
We never call an entry a product, a review, a rating, an offer, an event, medical advice, or a legal service. That is not an oversight. Those descriptions carry claims this site does not make, and using one to win a richer search result would mean telling a search engine something we decline to tell you.
Images
Editorial illustrations explain a process, a glass, a technique, or a piece of history. They are never presented as a photograph of a specific real bottle, label, vintage, distillery, winery, tasting, or event. Where a photograph would make a claim we cannot support, there is no photograph. Diagrams are drawn from the same numbers as the surrounding text, so a figure and the prose beside it cannot disagree.
What this method does not give you
A methodology page that only lists strengths is marketing. These are the real limits, and they apply no matter how carefully the rest is done.
- Verified does not mean current at this second. It means a person checked the named source on the date shown. A rule can change the day after. Where the answer matters, open the reference we cite.
- Jurisdictional coverage is uneven. The site covers the jurisdictions it has verified, and that is far from all of them. A missing jurisdiction is a gap, not a statement that no rule exists there.
- General information is not advice about your situation. A verified rule with a date attached still cannot account for your circumstances, and nothing here is a substitute for a lawyer, a doctor, or a pharmacist who knows them.
- Sensory description is interpretation. Production and chemistry claims are sourced. How something tastes is a description offered in good faith, not a measurement.
- Absence of a review badge is common. Most pages have not been through specialist review, and the page says so plainly rather than implying an approval it does not have.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us. Substantive corrections are made and the update date on the page changes. A legal fact that turns out to be stale is pulled back to an unverified state immediately rather than left standing while it is rechecked, because the cost of a wrong rule sitting there is higher than the cost of a visible gap.
Related: how pages are commissioned, written, and retired, the adult audience and impairment rules, and the reviewer standard.