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Scoby & Spout

Affiliate disclosure

This site is funded by affiliate commission. Here is exactly how that works, what it pays for, and the specific things it is not allowed to change.

Last updated September 1, 2026

The short version

Scoby & Spout is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. When you buy something after clicking a link here, we may earn a commission. It costs you nothing extra — the price you pay is the same as if you had gone to Amazon directly.

Not every outbound link on this site is an affiliate link. Sources, manufacturer documentation and citations are ordinary links that earn nothing, and they are the majority of what we link to.

Links that earn today:

  • Amazon — affiliate links, tagged scobyandspout-20. Marked rel="sponsored nofollow" and routed through our own /go/ resolver so the click can be counted.

Links that earn nothing. These are specialist suppliers we point at because they are sometimes the honest answer — a live culture often ships better from a culture house than from a marketplace — and we are not in an affiliate program with any of them:

  • Kombucha Kamp — reference link. We earn no commission there.
  • The Kombucha Shop — reference link. We earn no commission there.
  • Fermentaholics — reference link. We earn no commission there.
  • Craft a Brew — reference link. We earn no commission there.
  • Cultures for Health — reference link. We earn no commission there.
  • MoreBeer — reference link. We earn no commission there.

What commission is not allowed to change

  • A ranking. Scores are computed from five weighted criteria applied to published specifications. Commission rate is not one of the five, so it cannot move a product up a page. The whole rubric and its arithmetic are on the methodology page.
  • Which retailer we recommend. Where a cheaper or better-stocked retailer is right for you, we say so even when it pays us less or nothing at all.
  • Whether a product appears at all. Nobody pays to be listed here. There is no sponsored placement and no advertorial on this site.
  • What we say about a product. Every product on this site carries a "skip it if" line stating the reason not to buy it. That line is written before the buy button and sits above it on the page.

What we do not accept

  • Payment for placement, ranking or a favorable mention.
  • Free products in exchange for coverage.
  • Sponsored posts, advertorials, or content written by a brand.
  • Anything that would require us to claim we tested hardware we have not tested.

A note on prices

Prices on this site come from a live data layer and expire after 48 hours. When a price is older than that, it disappears and the button says "check price on Amazon" instead. We never write a price into page copy, because a number in prose goes stale without anyone noticing. Whatever Amazon shows you at checkout is the real price; anything here is a snapshot with a date on it.

A note on testing

We have not brewed on the hardware reviewed here, and we never claim to have. Everything on this site is compiled from published specifications, cited to the document it came from. That is stated on every commercial page and it is the whole basis of the method.

Questions

If anything about how this site is funded is unclear, ask: info@scobyandspout.com, or use the contact form. Our full standards are on the editorial policy page.