About
Editorial standards
How CiderHQ is allowed to write about an alcoholic drink: the neutrality standard, the constructions it bars, and the check that stops a build when one gets through.
CiderHQ writes about a product that harms some of the people who use it. That fact sets the editorial standard, and it is not a matter of tone. A site can explain fermentation chemistry, orchard history, protected designations and the difference between bitterness and astringency without once suggesting that the reader should have a drink. Everything here is written on that basis.
The rule is short. *Describe what something is and why it is that way. Never urge anyone to consume it.* Everything below is that rule worked out in detail.
The alcohol-neutrality standard
Six commitments, each of which constrains what can be written rather than merely how it sounds.
- No encouragement to consume. No page urges, invites or nudges anyone towards a drink. That includes the soft forms: the occasion, the mood, the reward, the implied company.
- No health benefits for alcohol. None are published, because current guidance from major health authorities does not support them. Where the chemistry of apple polyphenols is genuinely interesting, it is written as chemistry and not as a reason to drink. See the alcohol and health policy.
- No rankings and no superlatives. No scores, no stars, no best-of lists. CiderHQ holds no basis on which one drink is better than another, and would not publish one if it did.
- No commercial interest in consumption. No affiliate links, no sponsorship of content, no producer placement. Commercial content is suppressed outright in troubleshooting and in anything touching alcohol and health, so that no page which might be read by someone in difficulty can carry a commercial motive.
- Producers appear only where necessary. Where a company is part of the history, holds a designation, or is where a documented method was developed. Never as an organising structure, and never with a link to buy.
- Intoxication is explained, not sold. Ethanol’s effects, unit arithmetic and the legal limits are all legitimate subjects. What is barred is treating any of them as an attraction.
Constructions that are barred
Listed explicitly rather than left to judgement, because “write neutrally” means nothing to a contributor at half past four on a Friday.
| Construction | Why it is barred |
|---|---|
| must-try | An instruction to consume, phrased as though the reader had already agreed. There is no factual content in it at all. |
| best cider, the best | A ranking presented as a fact. CiderHQ holds no basis for ranking one drink above another, and a superlative with no measure behind it is an opinion wearing a fact’s clothes. |
| perfect for | Turns a sensory interaction into a prescription. A high-acid cider cuts through a fatty dish — that is a mechanism, and it belongs in a pairing record. That it is perfect for a barbecue is a recommendation to drink, made by someone who has met neither the reader nor the barbecue. |
| irresistible | Asserts that the reader cannot decline. Applied to an alcoholic drink, it is precisely the framing that people trying to drink less are working against. |
| delicious | A judgement stated as a property of the liquid. Trained tasters disagree about the same glass; a site that settles it for them has stopped describing and started selling. |
| drink more | Direct encouragement of consumption. No public-health framing survives it, and no editorial purpose requires it. |
| treat yourself | Frames alcohol as a reward. It is a marketing construction, and it works by attaching drinking to emotional need. |
| party, get tipsy | Describes intoxication as an occasion or an outcome to seek. Intoxication is a pharmacological effect CiderHQ will explain and will not advertise. |
| crowd-pleaser | Social pressure in one word. It says the drink is what other people will expect you to serve, which is an argument about consumption rather than about cider. |
| sessionable, used as praise | The word has a real technical meaning — lower strength, so more of it can be drunk in one sitting. Used as a compliment, that meaning becomes the recommendation. Where the strength matters, CiderHQ states the strength. |
The list is not exhaustive and is not meant to be. It names the constructions that recur, and the general rule stands behind it: any phrasing whose function is to encourage consumption is barred, whether or not it appears above. A new formulation that does the same work is caught by the rule, not excused by its absence from the table.
None of these words is banned as vocabulary. Party appears in a history of wassailing; best appears in a quoted seventeenth-century title. What is barred is the construction — the use that recommends. A quotation is a quotation, and a description of what somebody else wrote is not CiderHQ speaking.
Sensory description without encouragement
The hardest part of the standard, because tasting language is almost entirely promotional by inheritance.
Almost every word available for describing a drink arrived through marketing or through wine writing, and most of them carry an implicit recommendation. The discipline CiderHQ applies is to say what a person perceives and, wherever possible, why — which compound, which process, which stage of ripening. A descriptor that can name ethyl hexanoate, or the breakdown of a precursor during maturation, is information. A descriptor that cannot say why it arises is an adjective.
Two consequences follow. Sensory characteristics are stated as perception rather than as properties of the liquid: astringency is what long-chain tannins do to salivary proteins, not a quality the cider possesses and the reader should want. And structural dimensions are recorded as bands rather than as points, because “Somerset farmhouse cider” covers a real range and a single number would assert a precision the category does not have.
The scales themselves are written to be neutral in both directions. High tannin is firm or heavy, not rich or disappointing; low carbonation is still, not flat. Nothing on a sensory scale reads as better at one end, because nothing about a sensory scale is better at one end. What is described as a fault is described as a fault, with its cause and whether it can be recovered — that is a separate and technical judgement, and it is the only kind of judgement the site makes about a drink.
The same fact, written both ways
| Not published | Published |
|---|---|
| A must-try bittersweet with irresistible depth. | A bittersweet cultivar: low acid, high tannin, and the class that gives West Country cider its structure. |
| Perfect for a summer afternoon. | Commonly served cool, between about 6 and 10 °C, where its carbonation and acidity read as fresh rather than sharp. |
| Deliciously sweet with a crowd-pleasing finish. | Medium sweetness. Residual sugar is high enough to soften the tannin, and the finish is short — sweetness suppresses the perception of bitterness rather than removing it. |
| Cider is good for you — full of antioxidants. | Apple juice carries polyphenols, and some survive fermentation. CiderHQ publishes no health benefits for alcohol, because current guidance from major health authorities does not support them. |
The pattern in the right-hand column is worth naming. Each rewrite replaces an instruction with a mechanism, and in doing so answers a question the promotional version could not: a reader who knows that sweetness suppresses the perception of bitterness can reason about a cider nobody has written about. That is the whole argument for the standard, independent of any public-health one.
The rest of the standard
Neutrality about alcohol is one constraint among several.
- Hedging is mandatory where a claim is a tendency. A typical characteristic must be written as one — commonly, typically, most often — and never as a universal property. The claim model refuses to store the unhedged form.
- Classification names its system. Nothing is described as “bittersweet” without saying under which scheme. The same fruit can classify differently under the English, French and Asturian systems, and differently again in a different climate.
- Historical claims avoid invention. No “invented by” formulation where the record is gradual, regional or contested — which, for cider, is most of it.
- Regulated requirements name the jurisdiction and the instrument, and carry an as-of date, because rules change and an undated rule becomes permanently wrong.
- Prose is authored, not templated. A sentence that varies only by a name is how a database starts sounding like a database. A record with nothing written for it is not published.
- British English, plain sentences, and no defensive throat-clearing. A statement the site cannot support is removed, not softened.
How this is enforced
An automated editorial audit runs over the content set and fails the build when it finds a barred construction. It sits alongside the data, evidence, identity, relationship, routing, link, accessibility and crawl audits, and the whole set has to pass before the site can be certified.
That arrangement matters more than the policy text does. A written standard depends on everyone remembering it; a failing build does not. It means a promotional phrase cannot reach a reader through inattention, a late change or a well-meant rewrite — the build simply stops, and someone has to decide deliberately to change the rule rather than accidentally to break it.
What the audit cannot check is whether a page is subtly recommending something without using a listed word. That is a judgement, it is made by whoever writes and reviews the page, and it is the part of the standard that rests on people rather than on tooling. If you find a page that reads as an encouragement to drink, that is an editorial error and it is worth reporting.