Terms of Use

Accepting these terms

These Terms of Use are an agreement between you and KnowSips. They apply whenever you visit the site, read a guide, run a search, or follow a link out of it.

By using the site you accept them, together with our privacy policy and our disclaimer. Those two pages are part of this agreement. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

These terms are the whole of the agreement about your use of the site, together with the two pages named above. Nothing said elsewhere — in a guide, in an email, or on another website — adds to them or replaces them.

Who may use the site

Anyone may read KnowSips. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to verify, and no reason for the site to know who you are in order to serve you a page.

It is written for a general adult readership and is not directed at children. That is not a restriction on reading it — a drinks reference is harmless enough — but it means the writing assumes an adult reader, and nothing here is designed or worded for a child.

If you are using the site on behalf of an organisation, you accept these terms for that organisation as well as for yourself.

What this site is, and is not

KnowSips is an editorial reference about non-alcoholic drinks. It explains what a drink is, how it is made, what changes its flavour, and what to do when a cup comes out wrong.

It is information only. KnowSips does not:

• sell anything, or process a payment of any kind;
• run advertising, sponsored placements, or affiliate links;
• rate, score, or review products;
• provide medical, dietary, or nutritional advice;
• cover alcoholic drinks.

There are no accounts, no comments, and no user submissions, so nothing on the site is contributed by readers.

What you may do with the content

You have a limited, personal, revocable licence to use the site. Under it you may:

• read the guides for your own use;
• link to any page here from anywhere;
• quote a short passage with clear attribution and a link back;
• print or save a page for your own reference, such as taking a brewing ratio to the kitchen.

"Personal" here means for you and the people around you. Printing a brewing guide and pinning it up in a staff kitchen is fine. Reprinting it in something you sell, or building it into a product, is not, and is covered below.

Quoting is deliberately permitted because a reference that could not be quoted would be useless to anyone writing about drinks. Keep the quotation short enough that a reader still has a reason to come and read the guide, name KnowSips, and link to the page you took it from. Quoting a figure and attributing it to us while changing what it says is not a quotation.

What you may not do

• Republish a whole guide, or a substantial part of one, anywhere else.
• Scrape the site to rebuild it, in whole or in part, under another name.
• Use our writing to train a model or populate another publication as if it were yours.
• Present our work as your own, or strip attribution from a quotation.
• Attempt to disrupt the site, or reach any part of it that is not published.

This licence ends automatically if you break these terms.

Intellectual property

The text, page structure, design system, diagrams, and photography on this site belong to KnowSips unless stated otherwise on the page.

Trademarks, brand names, and product names that appear in a guide belong to their owners and are used only to identify what is being discussed. Their appearance here is not a claim of ownership, an endorsement, or a partnership.

Quoting a short passage with attribution and a link back is expressly permitted above, and we would rather be quoted well than not at all. If you want to go further than that — reprint a guide, translate one, use a diagram in teaching material — ask through the contact page. Requests of that kind are usually granted, and the answer is faster than the risk of guessing.

Automated access and text mining

Search engines are welcome to crawl the site, and the rules for well-behaved crawlers are published in the site's robots file, alongside a sitemap that lists every page worth indexing. Nothing here is hidden from a search engine that respects them.

Beyond that, bulk extraction is not permitted. That covers scraping the site to rebuild it elsewhere, harvesting the guides into a dataset, and using this writing as training material for a model. The restriction is about the whole corpus rather than about a single page: reading one guide, quoting a passage, or saving a page for yourself is ordinary use and always has been.

Automated requests that degrade the site for other readers are not permitted either, regardless of purpose. We may block traffic that does so.

Accuracy and the limits of a guide

Guides are researched carefully and corrected when we find an error. Even so, the site is offered as general information with no warranty that it is complete, current, or suited to your particular situation.

Drinks are physical things. What you get depends on your ingredients, your equipment, your water, and your kitchen, none of which we can see. A figure here is a typical value or a range for the preparation described, and your result can sit outside it. Our editorial policy sets out how we research and what we refuse to claim.

No professional advice

Nothing on this site is medical, dietary, nutritional, or legal advice, and nothing here should be used to diagnose, treat, or manage any condition. Caffeine figures and similar numbers are published as general reference ranges, never as a recommendation about what any individual should consume.

If you have a question about your own health, caffeine intake, allergies, medication, pregnancy, or feeding a child, ask a qualified professional who knows your circumstances. The disclaimer covers this in more detail.

Links to other sites

We link out to reference sources so you can check a claim for yourself. We do not control those sites, we are not responsible for their content, and their content can change after we link to it. A link is not an endorsement of everything on the other end of it.

Availability and changes

We do not promise the site will always be reachable. It may be unavailable for maintenance, or because of a fault outside our control. We may add, change, or withdraw a guide at any time, and we may update these terms; the version on this page is the one in force.

Guides are withdrawn rarely, and normally only when a page turns out to be wrong in a way that cannot be repaired by correcting it. Where a page is removed or merged into another, its address is pointed at the guide that now covers the subject rather than left to fail, so a link you saved or published keeps working.

There are no accounts here, so there is nothing to suspend or terminate. If you stop using the site, nothing further is required of either of us.

Privacy, in one paragraph

The site has no accounts, no comments, no newsletter, and no contact form, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to fill in. It does not sell or share personal data. Where a measurement or advertising service is in use, it is named in the privacy policy, which is the authoritative page on this and is part of these terms. If the two ever appear to disagree, the privacy policy governs.

Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, KnowSips is not liable for loss or damage arising from acting on information published here, from the site being unavailable, or from anything on a site we linked to.

You are responsible for your own judgement about what you prepare and drink, and for reading the labels and storage instructions on the products you buy. Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, nothing in these terms limits it.

Indemnity

If your use of the site in breach of these terms causes a claim against us, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it. This is aimed at misuse such as republishing or scraping, not at ordinary reading.

If part of these terms fails

If any part of these terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive the right to enforce it later.

Where a term is found to be too broad to enforce, it should be read as narrowed to whatever the law does allow rather than struck out entirely, so long as that leaves it doing the job it was written to do.

Reporting a problem

If you find a factual error in a guide, please tell us. Corrections are the most useful message this site receives and are dealt with before anything else; the contact page explains what to include so a correction can be acted on quickly.

If you find a security problem — a way to reach something that is not published, or anything that exposes another reader's request — report it to the same address and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before publishing details. We will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine issue in good faith, does not access or alter anyone else's data, and does not degrade the site for other readers while testing.

If you believe something here infringes your copyright, write to us with the page address, the material concerned, and what your rights in it are. We would rather resolve that by correcting attribution or removing the material than by argument.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law that applies where the site operator is based, without regard to conflict-of-law rules that would point elsewhere.

No specific jurisdiction is named on this page. Naming one we had not confirmed would make these terms look more settled than they are, which is the opposite of the point of writing them plainly. Nothing in this section removes any right you have under the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, and where that law gives you a stronger position than these terms do, it is the law that applies.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to editors@knowsips.com or through the contact page. See also our privacy policy and disclaimer.