About Coupe & Cube

Coupe & Cube is written for someone who already makes a decent drink. You know what a Hawthorne strainer is. You own a shaker - it just sticks. You are not learning to bartend, you are fixing one weak link.

Most barware coverage is written for the opposite reader: someone starting from nothing, being told to buy a twelve-piece set. That is a fine article to write and it is useless if you already own the twelve pieces and one of them is letting you down.

So the organizing idea here is one weak link at a time. The home bar upgrade guide is the clearest expression of it - it is arranged by symptom rather than by product category, because that is how the problem actually presents itself.

Michael W. is the hands-on owner behind The First Buyer, the small publishing brand that runs Coupe & Cube. He built this site for the drinker who already makes a decent cocktail and wants to fix the one part of their setup that is letting the rest down.

Every page on this site carries that byline. There is no editorial team, no rotating cast of freelancers and no anonymous 'our experts'. If something here is wrong, there is one person to tell.

You will not find a list of credentials on this page, because there is not one to list, and inventing qualifications is the easiest thing in the world to do and the easiest thing to be caught doing. What you get instead is a stated method and an explicit account of its limits.

Coupe & Cube is published by The First Buyer, a small independent publishing brand. You can find the hub at thefirstbuyer.com.

That is the whole ownership story. No media group, no network of sites cross-linking to each other to manufacture authority, and no undisclosed commercial relationships with any brand mentioned here.

We do not run a test lab. We have not personally used every product on this site, and we never write as though we have - no 'in our testing', no 'after three months of use', no scores presented as measurements we took.

What we do instead: compare published specifications and materials, read what owners report over long periods, and select on criteria we state on the page. Every commercial page carries a What we could not verify section saying exactly where the limits of that are.

There are also no testimonials on this site, and no star ratings. Both would have to be invented, and inventing either is the fastest way to lose a reader permanently.

The full method is on how we pick.

Affiliate commission, and nothing else. When you buy something through a link here we receive a small payment from the retailer at no extra cost to you. There are no sponsored placements, no paid inclusions and no gifted-product reviews.

Commission rate has never set an ordering on this site. The full disclosure is on affiliate disclosure, and the way we handle the incentive is described honestly on how we pick.