Friday 18 May 2012

Free Beer

The subject came up briefly during the second session of EBBC, in which Adrian Tierney-Jones and Simon Jenkins were offering generous advice on how to improve beer writing.

It's a hot topic at the moment and has led to Dave running the little "competition" in which a number of lucky bloggers who responded to our Rhetoric with reasonable integrity are taking home a bottle.

I was chatting with Neil Walker of Eating isn't Cheating yesterday in North Bar who provided the best example of how to go about requesting beer from a brewery that I've encountered so far.

"If I know I can't or won't be able to get hold of the beer in question locally, I simply send a polite email asking that should the brewery happen to be sending out beers for review, please would they consider sending me one."

As Adrian said in his talk, it's up to the blogger as to how they conduct themselves and indeed up to the brewer to decide how they'd like to respond.

Our point of view has been made clear by Dave, who believes that - as it stands - bloggers make up a large part of our target audience, it doesn't make any sense in business terms to give your product away that easily.

I'd certainly be more open to requests, were it to come down to my decision, if the requests were as polite as those outlined here.

1 comment:

  1. I'll always ask the brewery if anywhere local stocks it so I can buy it myself and often get offered to be sent for free instead.

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