As I mentioned, I had Deschutes Brewery’s latest Jubelale (their winter brew) with dinner the other night, and I also have a 750ml bottle of their fresh hop ale, Hop Trip, in the fridge. I haven’t tried it yet, but it is endorsed by one of my favorite local bands, The Elephants.
I didn’t pay for either beer, nor for my last three bottles of Mirror Pond Pale Ale, nor the excellent bottle of Deschutes’s anniversary Belgian-style ale. I’m on their PR list, which means *I regularly receive free beer in the mail.* I also ended up on the Schafer Vineyards PR list, probably because I wrote a few wine columns for MSN a couple years ago. The other day Fedex delivered a bottle of Schafer Merlot and I had to show ID when I signed for it. Carded by the Fedex guy! How cute. “I wonder what kind of alcohol is in that package,” mused Iris.
There’s a point to this beyond just bragging about the free swag. I am not sure how to handle freebies, and I’m asking for reader advice. This can be a very boring topic, I know, so I’m going to lay it out as simply as I can.
Some people claim that getting a product free doesn’t affect their ability to impartially judge its quality. That may be true for them. It’s not true for me. You know the stereotype about writers stampeding for free food? Guilty. (Free beer? Even more so.)
It would be impractical and probably dumb for me to never accept freebies. Here’s an example. I write a column for Seattle Magazine called Chef Test, where I recruit a local chef and we do an ingredient taste-test. In a recent issue, for example, I tasted five olive oils with Ethan Stowell, the chef-owner of Seattle’s hottest Italian restaurant, Tavolata. (The winner was a Spanish olive oil!) Last month I did a tasting at an Eastside Chinese restaurant, and they sent me home with enough food for dinner and lunch the next day. It would have been extremely rude to refuse the food. (I’m sorry to be coy about the ingredient and restaurant involved, but the feature hasn’t run yet.)
I went to a special media lunch last month at Monsoon, a Vietnamese restaurant in my neighborhood, to meet cookbook author Andrea Nguyen. Her book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, is the best Vietnamese cookbook in English, by a mile. (She also has a blog.)I write about Asian food, and I was excited to talk to someone who does it so much better than I do. Of course, the lunch, consisting of recipes from Andrea’s book, was awesome.
The usual way that writers deal with this sort of thing is to disclose. I’m not sure how far to take that, though. If I mention a restaurant whose chef I know personally, I’ll tell you. If I mention a beer that came to me via UPS, I’ll tell you. Sometimes I get free review copies of cookbooks. I can mention that, too.
When I wrote restaurant reviews for the Seattle Times, I never met chefs (with one exception I can think of, in the form of Scott Simpson) and never accepted freebies, period. I was able to do that in part because my food was paid for by the Times. I eventually stopped doing reviews for two reasons: I was tired of going out to dinner and missing Iris’s bedtime, and I wanted to write more for the Sunday paper, which required meeting more chefs.
It would be very easy, I think, for me to come up with a justification for any freebie and slide thoughtlessly into being the guy whose opinion is untrustworthy because you never know when he’s talking up something he got for free. What do you, my readers, think? If you don’t care at all and are only here for Iris’s jokes, I can live with that!
And try the Jubelale, it’s great.
