- Some links are affiliate links. Buy through one and we may earn a commission.
- You never pay more. The price is identical whether you use our link or go direct.
- Commissions don't pick the winner. Gear is chosen on specs and the same math the calculators run, and we say so when the cheap option is the right one.
- Nothing here is paid placement. No sponsored posts, no money for a spot on a list, no free samples.
Where things stand today
There are currently no affiliate links anywhere on this site. Every page you can reach right now is a calculator — the gear pages aren't written yet, and nothing on the site earns anything when you click it. We're publishing this page before there's money involved rather than after, because the standards below are easier to believe when they're set out in advance.
How affiliate links work
When you click an affiliate link, you go to the retailer's own site as normal. Their system records that the visit came from us, usually with a cookie, and if you buy something within their attribution window they pay us a small percentage. The price you pay is exactly the same — the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your wallet.
We never see your name, your order, your payment details, or what you bought. At most we see an anonymous count of sales attributed to the site. Our privacy policy covers the data side in full.
Every affiliate link on this site is built by a single piece of code that
attaches the program tag and marks the link
rel="sponsored nofollow noopener". That's the marking Google requires
for paid links, and doing it in one place means a link can't accidentally
ship unmarked.
Which programs we're in
Applied for, not yet live. We've applied to the following, and will move each into the list above — with whatever disclosure wording it requires — only once it's actually approved and links are running:
- Amazon Associates — hydrometers, refractometers, kegging parts and smaller equipment
Where a manufacturer or a specialist homebrew shop runs its own program — the kind of place that actually stocks a 30-liter mash tun — we'd rather link there than default to Amazon, and we'll say which is which.
How we decide what to recommend
This is the part that matters, so here are the actual rules:
- The math picks first. Every gear page is anchored to the calculators: a kettle is judged on the batch size it can actually boil at your boil-off rate, a chiller on how fast it moves the temperature, a hydrometer on whether it reads true. If the numbers favor a product that pays us nothing, that's the one we name.
- We say when cheap wins. Plenty of the best answers in brewing are unglamorous and barely profitable: a $10 hydrometer read correctly beats a $60 refractometer read wrong; a bag in a pot makes the same beer as a three-vessel rig; batch sparging needs no extra equipment at all; dry yeast is cheaper, keeps longer and often ferments cleaner than the liquid pack. We publish those anyway, because they're correct.
- No paid placement, ever. Nobody can buy a mention, a ranking, a review, or a link. We don't accept sponsored posts, paid guest articles, or link exchanges.
- No pay-to-play rankings. Where we compare products, the order is set by specifications and suitability. Commission rates are not a factor, and a higher-paying product does not get moved up.
- We disclose gifted products. We don't currently accept free samples or review units. If that ever changes, anything we were given will be labeled as such on the page where it appears.
A brewing site that recommends whatever pays best gets read once. One that tells you to spend $30 on a temperature-controlled fermentation setup before you spend $900 on a shiny all-in-one gets bookmarked — and the trust is worth more than the commission on one kettle. That's not altruism, it's the business model: the honest answer is the one that brings you back for the next brew.
What is never an affiliate link
References are references. Links to Palmer's How to Brew, Tinseth's own utilization page, ASBC methods, BJCP style guidelines, a maltster's analysis sheet or a yeast lab's data sheet are cited because the math on this site comes from them — they earn us nothing and never will. The same goes for anything we link to as evidence for a claim.
Prices and availability
Prices change, stock runs out, and manufacturers revise models without changing the name. Anything we quote was accurate when written, and the retailer's own page is always the authority at the moment you buy. If you find something out of date here, tell us and we'll fix it.
One thing this page isn't
A recommendation to buy anything. Most of what separates good homebrew from bad is process, not equipment — pitching enough yeast, controlling the fermentation temperature, keeping things clean, and measuring what you actually did. All of that is free or nearly free, and all of it is what the calculators here are for. The gear pages exist for when you've decided you need equipment, not to talk you into needing it.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a recommendation looks influenced by a commission, say so directly: [email protected]. That's a complaint we take seriously, and one we'd rather hear than not.