Privacy policy

Hop Grail is a register of beer, not a register of you. We collect the minimum needed to run your account and nothing we collect is ever sold. Hop Grail is run by Hop Grail LLC, Honolulu, Hawaii (“Hop Grail,” “we,” “us”).

What we collect

Your email address, to sign you in. On the website we email a magic link, or you choose Continue with Google. In the iOS app we email a one-time code. If you choose Continue with Google, Google tells us your email address and the basic profile details it shares at sign-in (your name and profile photo); we don't get your Google password or anything else in your Google account. No passwords exist to leak. If you watch a beer or brewery without an account, we keep your email to send that alert. If you sign up for our newsletter, The Friday Pour, we keep your email for that too — we first email you a link to confirm, and nothing is sent until you click it. Every issue has a one-click unsubscribe.

What you add to your own account: grails, journal entries and scores, ratings, private notes, style lanes, brewery visits, follows, and crawls. If you import your check-in history from Untappd, your device reads the file, and we keep the beer names, brewery names, ratings and dates from it.

Label photos you take when you use the label scanner: stored privately to your account as the evidence behind a scan, never published without a separate step you take.

Tap-list and menu photos you submit at a brewery: stored privately and never shown to anyone. We read the beer names off the board and use them to update that brewery's tap list (more below).

Rough location, only if you turn it on: the “near me” map features, the optional city-level scan tagging, and on-site brewery check-ins each ask first, and location is read only while the app is open. A check-in sends your position once, so we can confirm you're within about 200 meters of the brewery. We keep the fact that you checked in and the date, not your coordinates.

Ask Hop Grail. When you ask a question, we send it to our AI provider to work out an answer, but we don't keep the question. We keep a short record of each one (the kind of question, any style or state it named, and how the answer was built), linked to your account if you're signed in, plus a one-way scrambled form of your IP address so we can enforce the daily limit.

What we do with it

Run the product. Your journal and notes are private to you. Personalized surfaces (the feed, “chosen for you”) read only your own activity. We never mine other users' behavior to profile you.

Some things you add help build the public register, without your name on them:

• Ratings. Your rating is pooled with other people's. A beer shows one public score, the median, once at least five people have rated it. We never show your individual rating to anyone else.
• Crawls. A crawl you make public can be seen by anyone with the link. It shows the crawl's name, city and stops, never who made it. Private crawls stay private.
• Tap-list and menu photos. We read the beer names from your photo automatically, and a person reviews it when something looks off. Those names can then appear on the brewery's tap list and can trigger “spotted” alerts for people following that beer. Your name and the photo itself are never shown.

We use Google Analytics to count page views in aggregate.

Emails and push. Weekly emails are on by default and turn off with one click, in your profile or in the email itself. We also email alerts about beers and breweries you follow or watch, and those turn off the same way.

Push notifications are optional and always ask first. We only offer them right after you grail a beer or follow a brewery — never just for visiting. On the website, if your browser supports it (on iPhone, only once you've added Hop Grail to your Home Screen), your browser shows its own permission prompt; if you allow it, we store that browser's push subscription (an address and keys from your browser's push service, plus which browser it is) and send alerts through that push service. In the iOS app, push is coming in the next version: iOS will ask your permission first, and we'll store the device token Apple gives us. Push follows the same switches as our emails — the Monday push goes only to people who still have weekly emails on — and you can turn it off any time in your browser or device settings, or with those switches in your profile.

Links to retailers. Some beer pages link to outside shops. When a link carries an affiliate code, we say so on the page, and we may earn a commission if you buy something. Following a link takes you to that retailer, whose own privacy policy applies. We don't send them your account information.

Who helps us run it

We use a small number of service providers, only to run Hop Grail:

• Vercel hosts the site.
• Supabase stores the database, accounts and private photos.
• Resend sends our emails.
• Cloudflare stores label images and our encrypted nightly backups.
• Google Analytics counts page views.
• Anthropic provides the AI that reads label photos and tap-list photos, answers Ask Hop Grail questions, drafts crawls, and writes the taste note on your profile from your ratings, follows, grails and lanes. We send it only what's needed for that task.
• Google signs you in when you choose Continue with Google.
• OpenAI draws Label Studio artwork from the brief you type. We send that brief, not your account.
• Your browser's push service (for example Google, Mozilla or Apple) and Apple Push Notification service deliver push notifications if you turn them on.

Cookies, ads and analytics

Today we use four kinds of cookies, all first-party except Google Analytics: one to keep you signed in; hg_watches, which remembers up to 24 beers and breweries you watch without an account, for a year; hg_ask, a random id that lets Ask Hop Grail count questions from visitors who aren't signed in (ten a day) — only the site can read it, it lasts a year, and it holds no question and no account; and Google Analytics cookies, to count visits.

What we never do

We don't sell your data. We don't share it with data brokers. We don't use your data to train AI models. Today, we don't track you across other apps or sites, and Hop Grail shows no ads.

Deleting your data

Delete your account any time from your profile. We delete the account and the sign-in, your label-scan photos, your Ask Hop Grail history, and the newsletter signup for your email. We also delete your grails, journal, notes, ratings, follows, visits, crawls, watches, tap-list photos, and the devices registered for notifications. Scan events stay in the register without your account on them. Products you contributed stay in the public register, without your account attached. Photos you uploaded with those products may stay for now. A barcode you helped match can still hold your account id. Questions or requests: curtis@hopgrail.com.

The register itself

The beer data (filings, labels, breweries) is public record, sourced from US TTB label filings and Open Brewery DB, plus breweries' own websites and newsletters and the tap-list photos people submit. See how the register works, the data license and our terms.

Contact

Hop Grail LLC
Honolulu, Hawaii
curtis@hopgrail.com