How We Work

Bills & Beans publishes explainers on three subjects — coffee, money, and civil liberties — written to a single formula: name something readers commonly believe, then check it against the record and the arithmetic. We don’t publish listicles, news reactions, or how-to content that goes stale in a month. Every piece is built to still be right a year after it runs, and every piece names the writer and the beat that writer owns.

What we publish, and what we don’t

• Coffee: how brewing works, what gear changes and what it doesn’t, what a cup costs, and what the label on a bag verifies. Gear pieces compare categories and tell you what each tier gives up; they don’t rank a single product as the answer.
• Money: how accounts, taxes, debt and investing work, shown on worked examples. We never recommend a specific stock, fund, or coin, and we never tell you to buy or sell anything. Where a piece touches a decision you might make, it carries a disclaimer written to that piece’s own claim, not a pasted footer.
• Liberty: terminology, how the law classifies things, and how the rules came to be — statutes, decided cases, and history. Nothing on this site tells you how to buy, build, modify, or carry a firearm, and we don’t build pieces around litigation that hasn’t been decided, because those pieces are wrong the day the ruling lands. Where the law is unsettled, we say so plainly and date the claim.

Sourcing

Every figure, date, rate, limit, and legal citation in a piece traces to a source we opened and read on the day the piece was checked. We prefer primary sources — the statute, the agency’s own data, the published study — over articles about them. A link that merely resolves isn’t good enough: it has to land on the document that supports the sentence it’s attached to. When a claim can’t be sourced, we cut the claim. We don’t soften it, and we don’t keep it because it sounds right.

Every piece ends with an Article sources list, so you can check our work without hunting through the prose.

How a piece is checked

The writer never checks their own work. A finished draft goes to a second reviewer who sees only the piece, its list of claims with their sources, and a fixed checklist — not the research trail, so they don’t inherit the writer’s blind spots. A failed point sends the piece back, never forward.

The checklist, in short: every number traces to a page that was opened and read on the day of the check, and the source says what we say it says — no rounding a “roughly” into an exact figure, no presenting a finding with more certainty than its author did. Every outside link lands on the document that supports the sentence, not the agency’s homepage. Where credible people disagree, the piece says so. The piece doesn’t contradict something we said elsewhere. Title, description, tags and byline match the argument, and pieces written in the same batch are read against each other, so a shared opening device or crutch word fails the batch, not just the piece.

Then a person reads it. Nothing on this site publishes without a human editor’s approval.

Who writes here

The bylines on this site are original editorial voices, not real people, and we say so on Meet the Desk. Research, drafting and the first verification pass are done with AI systems working to the standards on this page; the decision to publish is a person’s.

Independence and advertising

Bills & Beans is supported by display advertising. Ad units are labelled, they sit in fixed positions that never interrupt a sentence, and no advertiser sees a piece before it runs or has any say in what we cover. We carry no sponsored content. If a piece ever includes an affiliate link — most likely on a coffee gear page — that page will say so at the top, and the Liberty section will never carry one.

Corrections

We will get things wrong sometimes, and would rather hear about it than not. Our corrections policy explains what happens when we do, and how to report one. Questions about anything on this page: info@billsandbeans.com.