Editorial policy

Four principles

1. Answer first. You arrived with a literal question. The answer goes in the first sentence and the explanation follows it. We do not warm up.
2. Specifics, not adjectives. "1.3 gallons, 304 stainless spigot, 10 in tall" is useful. "A high-quality, durable brewing vessel" is not, and we try never to write it.
3. Say what we do not know. Withheld claims are the asset. Where a maker publishes no figure, the page says so.
4. Never inflate. No hype, no urgency, no scarcity, no exclamation marks. There is nothing to rush about a hobby that takes two weeks per batch.

Sourcing standards

• Every product specification is attributed to the maker's or retailer's own published document, with the date it was retrieved. That attribution renders on the product, not in a footnote.
• Quoted material claims — a pressure rating, a steel grade, a certification — are quoted verbatim, because paraphrasing a specification is how a specification quietly changes.
• Figures are never carried across from one model to another in the same product line, even by the same maker. Where a rating exists for one size and not another, the page says exactly that.
• Where a figure does not exist, the field reads "not published". We do not estimate, interpolate or infer from a photograph.

What we will never publish

• A testimonial or review of this site. Scoby & Spout is new and has no reviews. Inventing them would be fraud, and there is no version of a fabricated testimonial that is a small problem.
• A claim of hands-on testing. We have not brewed on this hardware. No "in our testing", no test lab, no owned units.
• A credential Scooter M. does not hold. No certifications, no medical review, no expert panel, no years of experience.
• A price outside the live data layer. No remembered figures, no "around $35", no price written into page copy.
• Health claims. Kombucha attracts a great deal of health marketing. We write about equipment and process. Anything about what a fermented drink does to a body is outside our competence and we leave it alone.

How products get onto the site

A product qualifies when it is currently sold, when a maker or retailer publishes enough specification to judge it, and when it is genuinely the sort of thing a home brewer of fermented drinks would buy. It is then scored on the published rubric and placed by that score.

Nobody pays to be listed and nobody can pay to be removed. A product with a bad score stays on the page with the bad score, because a roundup with only good options in it is not a roundup.

How often pages are reviewed

Prices refresh daily from the live layer and expire automatically after 48 hours. Specifications are re-checked when a maker changes a listing, when a reader reports a discrepancy, or when a page is substantially rewritten. Every page carries its published and last-updated dates in the byline; those dates are real and are not touched to manufacture freshness.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. When we do, the correction is made on the page rather than quietly deleted, and the last-updated date moves.

To report an error, email info@scobyandspout.com or use the contact form. A link to the maker's published figure turns it into a five-minute fix, and a correction to a specification is the most useful message this site receives.

On how these pages are written

Research, drafting and the assembly of this site are AI-assisted. That does not lower the standard, and it is why the sourcing rules above are strict and mechanical rather than aspirational: every figure has to point at a document, and a figure with no document does not get published. If you find one that does not hold up, tell us and we will fix it.