How we check where a beer is brewed

This site makes one kind of claim: that a named beer sold in a British supermarket is brewed in a particular place, owned by a particular company, and sold at a particular strength. Each of those is checkable, and each carries a source and a date on the beer's own page. This page explains where those come from and what we do when they disagree.

What counts as a source

What matters is what the source is copying, not how well known it is. Strongest is the brewer's own statement about its own product: its website, press releases and product pages. Next is a seller's product page that transcribes the printed panel on the pack, giving the producer name and address, the country of origin and the strength. Any UK retailer or wholesaler qualifies there, because they are all reproducing the same panel. Alongside those sit rulings by the Advertising Standards Authority, Companies House filings and the trade press, meaning The Grocer, Morning Advertiser, Just Drinks, The Drinks Business, Beer Today and Food Manufacture, along with the BBC, the Financial Times and the Guardian.

One condition applies to a seller's listing: it has to name the pack, and the pack has to be one sold at retail. A draught or catering listing describes a different product. St Austell Proper Job is 4.5% in cask and 5.5% in bottle, and Timothy Taylor Landlord is 4.3% in cask and 4.1% in bottle, so taking the pub figure for the supermarket product would be wrong in both directions.

Wikipedia, Untappd, marketing copy, forums and blogs never saw the pack. They are useful for finding a lead and are not used to establish a fact. Where a row rests on one of them, it cannot be marked verified, and the page says which claim is the weak one.

The three verification levels

Verified 87 beers

The three claims that matter, where the beer sold in the UK is brewed, its UK strength and who owns the brand, each rest on the brewer's own statement or on a seller's page transcribing the pack. Where the exact brewery is inferred rather than named, the page says so.

Partly verified 45 beers

At least one of those three claims rests on a secondary source or an inference, a disagreement between sources is still open, or a split supply has a format that has not been read.

Unverified 18 beers

No brewer statement or pack transcription has been found for the key claims. This page is published so that readers can send evidence; it is not indexed by search engines.

The exact brewery is a different matter. A pack has to name the producer's company and address, not the brewery, so for a brewer with more than one site the pack cannot say which. Where a brewer's statement or the trade press names the site, the page records it; where only the company is named, the page says the site is inferred. That does not hold a beer at partly verified, because the question this site asks is which country the beer is made in, not which town.

A level can be lowered without a source, because lowering it is the honest direction: if we lose confidence in a claim, we say so immediately. Raising a level always requires a fetched primary source, quoted in the change that makes it. The same rule governs the strengths, the supply and the brewery sites: a value can be moved back to "not established" with a note, but it cannot be changed to a new value without evidence.

When the sources disagree

It happens more than you would expect, and usually between two listings for the same beer at the same retailer. We do not pick the more plausible side. The beer's page shows both readings, labelled as a disagreement, with the date the check was made, and the row stays partly verified until a primary source settles it. Every open case is listed on the page of open questions.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we would rather know. A correction changes the data, is recorded on the change log with what the value was and what it became, and appears on the beer's own page under "what changed" for twelve months. Nothing is quietly edited. A contact address will be published here when the domain is settled.

What would close the gaps

The single most useful piece of evidence is the small print on a can or bottle: the producer name and address, and the country of origin field. That one panel settles most of the open questions here, and it is the only evidence that reflects what is on the shelf this week rather than what a website said last year. A route for readers to send those photographs is not open yet. Until it is, the open questions are listed in public on the page of things we cannot settle rather than quietly guessed at.

Who runs this

Mark Porter, one person, in the United Kingdom. There is no institution behind this and no pretence of one. The site takes no advertising, sells nothing, and has no commercial relationship with any brewer or retailer. No brand pays to appear on any list here, and the lists are built by rules that are stated on the pages themselves.

It is a reference, not a campaign. Brewing a foreign brand under licence in Britain is legal and has been normal since the 1970s. The point of the site is that the beer is often a different beer from the one on the label, which is a fact you can check, and which you are entitled to know before you pay for it.