About
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know. This page sets out how to report it, what happens next, and what CiderHQ commits to doing about it.
A reference work that cannot be corrected is a reference work that is slowly getting worse. Cider is a subject where errors propagate unusually well: a figure quoted without its context, a classification asserted without its system, a date attached to an invention that was actually gradual — each gets copied, and each copy makes the next one look better sourced than it is.
Reporting an error is therefore a genuine contribution, and it is treated as one.
How to report something
Write to privacy@hekno.co.uk. There is no form: the site posts nothing anywhere, holds no accounts and collects nothing about you, and adding a form purely to receive corrections would undo that.
What to include
- The page. Its address, or enough of the title to find it.
- The statement. Quote the sentence or figure you think is wrong, so there is no ambiguity about which claim is at issue.
- What it should say, as far as you can tell.
- A source, if you have one. This is the part that decides how quickly anything can change. A named document, a section or page reference, and a link if it is online. “Everyone in the trade knows this” is a real signal that something needs checking, and it is not something CiderHQ can publish.
Reports about how something is written are equally welcome — a page that reads as an encouragement to drink is an editorial error under the editorial standards, and so is a superlative or a recommendation that has crept in. Accessibility problems have their own route, on the accessibility statement.
What happens to it
- The claim is located in the data. Every statement on the site comes from a record, and the record names the sources it rests on. That is the first thing checked: what does the claim actually cite, and does the cited source support what the page says?
- The source is checked within its competence. A source may only be cited for the subjects it is registered as competent for. A surprising number of errors turn out to be this rather than a wrong fact — a claim resting on a source that is authoritative about something adjacent.
- One of four things then happens. The claim is corrected in the data; or it is re-tiered, if the evidence turns out to be weaker than recorded; or it is recorded as disputed, where credible sources genuinely disagree; or it is removed outright, if nothing adequate supports it.
- Everything built from that claim changes with it. Because pages are generated from the records, a correction reaches every page that draws on the same record — including derived material, which is regenerated rather than edited.
| What is found | What is done |
|---|---|
| The claim is wrong and a better source exists | The claim is corrected in the data, the source register updated, and the as-of date reset where the claim is time-sensitive. |
| The claim is right but overstated | It is re-tiered or re-typed — commonly from a flat statement to a hedged typical characteristic — so the phrasing matches the evidence. |
| Credible sources genuinely disagree | It is recorded as disputed, and the page explains the disagreement instead of picking a side. |
| Nothing adequate supports it | It is removed. A claim with no source is not softened into a hedge; it goes. |
| The report is right about a gap rather than an error | The gap is recorded against the source, with what is published instead — which is usually nothing. |
The standing commitment
This is the difference between a site that can be corrected and one that merely appears to have been. If a wrong figure is edited out of one paragraph but left in the record, the same figure comes back on the next page generated from it, in a related list, in a comparison, in a derived result — and it comes back looking freshly written rather than like the error it is.
It also means a correction is auditable. The record changed, the sources it cites changed, and the automated checks that run before anything is published — data plausibility, source competence, claim publishability, editorial neutrality — run against the corrected record rather than against a sentence.
Two smaller commitments follow from the same principle. A claim that turns out to be unsupported is removed rather than downgraded into a vague hedge, because vagueness is how an unsupported claim survives. And where an error was material and someone might have relied on it, the corrected page says what changed rather than quietly presenting the new version as though it had always said that.
Corrections made
Material errors corrected in the data, with what changed. Listed so that anyone who relied on the earlier version can see that it changed, and how.
| When | Where | What was wrong | What it says now |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2026 | Fermentation progress tool | Could call a cider finished after three days of readings that compared only the first and last, and then showed no caution about bottling — including for a gravity that was still falling slowly or readings that contradicted each other. | A finish is reported only after a full week in which every reading agrees, with nothing in the log out of line, and a caution about bottling is shown in every case. |
| October 2026 | Bottle pressure and priming tools, and the pages that quote them | Described a crown-capped beer bottle as rated for, or safe to, about 4 bar. | About 4 bar is described as a common rule of thumb, not a rating or a guarantee; bottles differ, and the maker’s stated rating is the figure to check. Pressures are labelled as gauge pressure and as estimates good to about a bar. |
| October 2026 | United States apple collection (Geneva, 2017): 47 cultivar pages and the study page | Labelled the collection’s phenolics as a Löwenthal permanganate titration in tannic acid equivalents, and its titration end-point as pH 8.2. | The figures are Folin–Ciocalteu, in gallic acid equivalents, and the end-point is pH 8.1, as the thesis states. No figure changed. The thesis’s tables were also checked against the sugars and pH the site had flagged: they are transcribed exactly, and the inconsistency is in the published source. |
| October 2026 | Three Counties perry survey, on the perry pear pages that cite it | Called it a survey of thirty-eight varieties. | It analysed thirty-eight juices from thirty-four varieties. |
| October 2026 | Cider brandy, and questions about distilling | Said distillation is licensed everywhere and that unlicensed distilling is a criminal offence in the United Kingdom. | States what the current law read says: producing spirits needs approval from the tax authority in the United Kingdom and authorisation in most other countries, and the exemptions that allow cider to be made at home do not cover spirits. |
| October 2026 | Poiré Domfront, Cidre du Pays d’Auge and the French sweetness tiers | Gave Poiré Domfront a strength of 1.5–4% and said the appellation requires a low alcohol, gave Pays d’Auge 3% and doux 3.5% at the ends of their bands, and called demi-sec a typical rather than a defined tier. | Each band now starts at its specification’s floor — 3% acquired for Domfront, 3.5% for Pays d’Auge — with doux capped at the decree’s 3% and demi-sec described as the defined tier it is. |
| October 2026 | Juice analysis interpreter | Described the ends of each reference band as the lowest and highest recorded measurements, but computed them from ranges that in several programmes are a mean plus or minus one standard deviation. Apple pH ran to 5.73, a figure nobody measured. | The ends are recorded figures, like the quartiles. Figures that cannot be reconciled with their own programme are shown on their cultivar pages and left out of every band, ranking and blend. |
| October 2026 | Perry styles | Said that gravity-based alcohol estimates overstate a perry’s strength. | That holds for an estimate from the starting gravity alone; the difference between starting and finishing gravity is not misled, because the sorbitol is still there at the end. |
| October 2026 | Colonial American cider | Said that freeze concentration required no licence, in a way that could be read as true today. | States that the UK and US personal-use exemptions for cider do not extend to spirits, that US federal law defines spirits by result and not by process, and that how freeze concentration of a fermented drink is classed must be checked with the tax authority concerned. |
| October 2026 | Blend explorer | Weighted measured figures across a blend whenever they shared a unit. Asturian titratable acidity (published as sulphuric acid) was averaged with North American figures (published as malic), both in g/L, and perry-pear total tannin was averaged with total phenolics measured by a different method. | Acidity is restated as malic before weighting, and a blend figure is produced only where every component shares the same property and unit. Otherwise the tool says why it has no figure. Tannin figures from different assays filed under one property are not yet separated. |
| October 2026 | Sediment, lees, haze against sediment, storage temperatures and old vats | Listed tartrate among the deposits a cider normally throws. Apples carry very little tartaric acid, and the crystalline deposit that wine throws is largely absent from cider. | The deposits named are yeast, pectin, protein and protein–tannin material. Tartrate is no longer described as a cider deposit. |
| October 2026 | Three Counties perry survey | Labelled the survey’s total amino acid figure as including proline, and said proline routinely outweighed the rest. | Proline cannot be part of that total, because it exceeds the total in eleven of the thirty-seven juices. The label says so, pending confirmation against the survey’s own column definition, and the proline point is stated as that count. |
| October 2026 | Juice analysis interpreter | The apple titratable-acidity reference band pooled Asturian figures published as sulphuric acid with figures published as malic acid. The two conventions differ by about a third, so readings were placed against a band that was too low — a median of 4.6 g/L rather than 5.3. | Every acidity figure now records the acid it is expressed as, and the band restates them all as malic before it is computed. |
| October 2026 | Austrian perry pear pages and the Klosterneuburg study | Said that acidity expressed as tartaric acid reads about a quarter lower than as malic, and that Spanish practice reports as malic. | Tartaric reads about an eighth higher than malic; it is sulphuric that reads about a quarter lower, and Spanish practice reports as sulphuric. |
| October 2026 | Quebec ice cider | Gave 9–13% without saying whose figure it was, and then for a time gave the general regulation’s figures as the protected name’s. | Two sets of figures apply. Quebec’s cider regulation: at least 30 °Brix before fermentation, at least 130 g/L of residual sugar, over 7% and up to 13% alcohol. The stricter protected name Cidre de glace du Québec: about 32 °Brix, at least 140 g/L, 9–13%. |
| October 2026 | Ice cider, and freeze concentration against cryoextraction | Described cryoextraction as fruit frozen on the tree or in cold store. | Cryoextraction under Quebec’s rules uses whole fruit frozen by natural cold — on the tree, or picked in autumn and left outside. Under the protected name all fruit, for either method, is pressed between 1 December and 1 March. Cold stores are not natural cold. |
What is not a correction
- Disagreeing with a sensory description. Trained tasters legitimately disagree about the same glass, which is why sensory statements are framed as perception rather than as properties of the liquid. If a descriptor is attributed to a mechanism that does not produce it, though, that is a correction.
- A measurement differing from your own. Two analyses of the same cultivar from different sites and decades are two measurements, not a contradiction. If you have a sourced analysis CiderHQ does not hold, that is an addition and it is welcome.
- Objecting that a producer or brand is missing. Producers appear only where historically, legally or technically necessary. There is no listings process, because there are no listings.
- Asking for a ranking or a recommendation. The site does not hold one and will not add one.
What we can and cannot promise
CiderHQ is a small operation. There is no service-level commitment on replies, and a report that needs a document to be obtained and read may take a while, because that is what obtaining and reading a document takes.
What is promised is narrower and more useful: a report that identifies a real error will result in the data changing, and a report that cannot be acted on will not be quietly ignored while the claim stands. Where a claim cannot be verified either way, the honest outcome is that it is re-tiered or removed rather than left at a confidence it has not earned.
Reports go to privacy@hekno.co.uk. The grading model a correction is assessed against is at the evidence policy; the register it resolves to is at sources.