Terms of use

CiderHQ is a reference work about cider and perry, written for adults of legal drinking age. It is intended for readers who want to understand the subject: people with a glass in front of them, growers choosing cultivars, makers diagnosing a problem, people in the trade who need a definition to be right, and students, writers and researchers who need a claim they can trace to a source.

It is not a shop, a directory, a ranking or a recommendation service. It carries no advertising and no affiliate links, and nothing on it encourages anyone to drink. What CiderHQ will and will not publish about alcohol is set out in the alcohol and health policy, and that policy is a statement of practice rather than of intent.

CiderHQ is built to be accurate, and the machinery for that is published rather than asserted: every claim records what kind of statement it is, how strongly it is supported and how quickly it is expected to go out of date; every citation resolves to a register that records how far each source was actually consulted; and automated checks refuse to publish a time-sensitive claim without a date or a regulated requirement without a jurisdiction.

None of that amounts to a warranty, and this notice does not offer one. The site is provided as it is. No warranty is given that any statement on it is accurate, current or complete, that it is fit for any particular purpose, or that the site will be available without interruption.

Two things in particular go out of date, and both are marked where they appear. Regulation changes: duty rates, labelling rules and protected-designation specifications are all time-sensitive, they carry an as-of date, and an as-of date is a record of when something was checked rather than a promise that it still holds. And measurements are historic observations: a figure recorded from a mid-century analysis of fruit grown at one site is exactly that, and it is neither a constant nor a prediction about your fruit.

Where a page marks something as derived by CiderHQ, that material is produced by the site’s own documented rules from other data. It is explainable, it is labelled, and it is not a substitute for a measurement or a source. How each derivation works, and what each refuses to claim, is set out in the methodology.

This deserves its own statement, because it is the point at which relying on a website stops being a small matter.

Anyone producing cider or perry for sale must work from the current regulations themselves, and from the authorities that administer them. What may be called cider, the minimum juice content, the strength bands, the registration and duty obligations, the labelling and allergen rules, the additive limits — all of these are set by instruments that change, and all of them differ by country. CiderHQ names the authority for each and explains the structure. It does not reproduce current rates or thresholds where doing so would create a figure that goes stale silently.

Treat what you read here as orientation: what the rules are about, which body sets them, and what questions to ask. Then go to that body. If your business depends on the answer, get advice on it.

The text, structure, data model, derived material and design of CiderHQ are the property of HEKNO LTD unless stated otherwise. No licence to republish them is granted by these terms.

Quoting a passage with attribution and a link, in the ordinary way one reference work cites another, is welcome and expected. Reproducing substantial parts of the site, or extracting its data set, is not — write and ask instead.

Material cited from other sources belongs to its own publishers and is used as citation. Where a source is quoted, the quotation is short, attributed and located, and the rights in it remain with whoever holds them.