Affiliate Disclosure

The statement

Amazon Associates

In plainer terms: when you click a buy link on this site and purchase something, we receive a small commission from the retailer. You pay exactly the same price -- the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not out of your pocket, and the price you see at checkout is unaffected by whether you arrived through us.

How links work

What happens when you click

Product links on this site route through our own /go/ path before reaching the retailer. That exists so we can manage links in one place and change a destination without rewriting articles. It adds one redirect and nothing else -- no tracking of you across other sites, no data collection beyond what the retailer does once you arrive.

Every earning link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow", which is the standard way of telling search engines a link is commercial. Every buy button carries a visible #ad marker and a link back to this page, and every page with a buy link carries a disclosure above the first one rather than only in the footer.

Who we earn from

And who we do not

We currently earn from Amazon only. That is the whole list. We have not joined brand-direct or network affiliate programs for any brewing manufacturer or specialist retailer.

That matters because this site does link to places we earn nothing from, and we think you should be able to tell the difference. Links to the following are reference links -- we have no affiliate relationship with any of them and receive nothing if you buy there:

• MoreBeer
• Northern Brewer
• Spike Brewing
• Ss Brewtech
• Grainfather
• KegLand
• Penguin Chillers

We link to them anyway, because sometimes a specialist retailer or a manufacturer’s own store is genuinely the better place to buy something -- welded conicals and glycol chillers are good examples. Recommending the place we earn nothing from is the point of saying this out loud.

Editorial independence

What commission does not change

This is the part that matters, so it is stated as commitments rather than reassurances:

• Commission rate never affects ranking. Where the cheaper product is the better buy, it is the pick. We do not sort roundups by what pays most and we do not promote a product because its program is more generous.
• No paid placements, ever. No manufacturer, retailer or brand can pay to appear on this site, to rank higher, or to have a competitor removed. Nobody has editorial input into what appears here.
• No sponsored posts. Nothing on this site is paid content, and there is no advertising beyond the affiliate links described on this page.
• We recommend against purchases regularly. The upgrade path opens by telling you to buy a temperature controller rather than a brewing system. Several roundups tell you that you probably do not need the category at all. Those pages earn us less and they are the honest answer.
• No free products in exchange for coverage. We do not accept review units on terms that involve coverage.

Prices

Why you never see a number we cannot verify

Affiliate sites most commonly mislead readers with a stale price rather than an undisclosed link, so this deserves its own section.

A price appears on this site only when it comes from a live, dated price feed, and when it does the date it was checked appears next to it. Where no live price exists, the button reads “Check price on Amazon” and you see the retailer’s current price when you arrive.

We also do not use discount, saving or urgency language anywhere -- no “lowest price,” no “save $X,” no “best deal,” no countdown timers and no stock counters. None of it would be verifiable and most of it would not be true. The full reasoning is on how we pick.

No reviews or ratings

And no rich-snippet markup for them

There are no star ratings, aggregate scores, review counts or customer testimonials on this site, because no such data exists for it. We have not collected user reviews and we are not going to generate numbers to fill a layout.

That extends to the page markup: we deliberately do not emit Review, AggregateRating or Offer structured data, all of which would assert data we do not have. The star snippets they produce in search results are attractive and not worth asserting something untrue to get.

Questions

Ask, and we will answer plainly

If anything about how this site is funded is unclear, or you want to know whether a specific link earns us anything, ask. Email contact@wortandkeg.com or use the contact form.

Wort & Keg is published by MadGrey LLC.