The standard this archive is held to
Editorial Policy
An archive is only worth what it can be trusted to say. This page sets out what enters the record, what evidence is required, and what money can and cannot buy — so that any of it can be checked, and any of it can be held against us.
- 01
Breweries cannot pay to rewrite history
No amount of money buys a change to a record. A brewery may correct a factual error — and we will thank them for it and cite them — but a closure stays a closure, an acquisition stays an acquisition, and a parent company stays in the chain. Commercial relationships are disclosed and never touch the record.
- 02
Evidence before completeness
A wrong record is worse than an empty field. Where a source names a beer but not its strength, the strength is published as UNKNOWN rather than estimated from its style. Roughly a third of the beers here carry an unknown ABV for exactly this reason, and that is a deliberate cost.
- 03
Sources are graded, and the grade is visible
First-party brewery statements, government registries and liquor-authority catalogues carry the most weight. Newspapers, trade press and scholarly work carry less. Aggregators and community databases are used to find candidates and are never sufficient on their own to enter a claim into the record.
- 04
Closed breweries are kept, not deleted
Every other directory removes an entry the moment it stops trading, which is precisely why a closure is almost impossible to research a year later — the evidence is destroyed by the people best placed to preserve it. Closures stay, labelled, with whatever could be established about how they ended.
- 05
Conflicts are published as conflicts
When two credible sources disagree — a brewery's own page against a liquor authority's listing, for instance — the disagreement is recorded rather than silently resolved in favour of whichever was read last. An unresolved identity is marked unresolved.
- 06
Corrections are welcome and credited
If a record here is wrong, tell us. Corrections backed by evidence are applied, dated, and the source is added. That process is identical whether the correction comes from a brewery, a historian, or a reader who noticed something.
Where the money comes from
The archive is free to read and carries no advertising against its records. It is funded by work that sits alongside it rather than inside it — printed maps, the passport app, and commercial relationships with the industry that supplies breweries. None of those relationships give anyone a say over what a record says. Where one exists, it is disclosed on the page it touches.
If you work in the trade, see suppliers & breweries. If you have found an error, that is the more useful email — info@tallysbeer.com.
This policy applies to every record in the archive. Read how we count for the methodology behind the numbers.