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May 11, 2005
Tea Review Ethics
I have reviewed a lot of teas. It really is a lot of fun. I started to review the teas for some tea drinking friends scattered throughtout the US. Certainly, I never thought I'd get all these emails from others worldwide, who have stumbled across my little corner of the Internet. Those emails are always a pleasant surprise, and really drives home just how global the Internet is.
Other things that have been occuring with increasing frequency are solicitations from tea vendors to send me free samples to review. One of the first vendors to do this was MySips Tea Company, which sells organic rooibos and yerba mate teas. I remember being a bit surprised by their email. Since unbiased reviews are of utmost importance to me, I politely declined their offer. I was worried that I would feel obliged to rate free samples more highly. So, I told MySips that I would buy their tea and review it instead.
More recently, I received a package from Adagio Teas. Apparently, they found my reviews of their teas, and sent me some samples, along with a ingenuiTEA teapot. Since I was already a customer of theirs, they had my address. Because of my previous actions with regards to accepting free samples, this puts me in a bit of an interesting quandary.
I quite like Adagio Teas. They have impressed me in several areas. I like how everything they sell is available in sample sizes packaged in nice tin canisters. You really could make a nice collection of those tea canisters. I was also pleased to see that Adagio is very Internet marketing savvy. This manifested itself from the way their spiffy website is designed, to the ease with finding teas on their site, to the way they utilize Google PageRank technology to determine rewards for their reviewers.
For those who don't know about Google PageRank, it is a quantitative scaling system to tell whether a particular site is 'popular' or not. The more people who link to a site, the more 'popular' it is. If you write reviews for Adagio Teas, and your link to their teas are on sites that have high Google PageRank numbers, then your rewards are given according to those Google PageRank numbers. Adagio is the only vendor I have seen so far that utilizes Google PageRank for rewards.
My reviews of Adagio's teas have been varied. There have been great reviews, and not so good reviews. Overall, I like their teas, even if some of their infusions were more successful than others. I found their rewards program a while ago, but decided not to submit my reviews because I was worried about the implications of getting free samples.
My main concern in this post isn't about whether I like certain teas, though. What I've been thinking about lately is how I will rate free samples in such a way that the integrity of my reviews are not compromised for my readers. That is really the most important issue for me, especially in light of the recent events surrounding Creative Commons and BzzAgent's recently terminated partnership.
Supporters of Creative Commons were dismayed to see an organization they truly believed in forming a partnership with a company that rewards its 'agents/reviewers' on a 'spread the buzz' basis. To the supporters of Creative Commons, this somehow cheapened what they believed in. I think that if Creative Commons was a vendor, the partnership with BzzAgent would have earned much less consternation. But this train of events emphasized the importance of full-disclosure to me.
In my experience as a reader of other reviews, there are some other interesting review models to note. If you're a fan of Japanese animation like I am, you've probably heard of Anime on DVD. Chris Beveridge, the founder of Anime on DVD, gets free anime DVDs all the time from vendors. Sometimes, he even gets DVDs prior to their official release dates. I like that Chris never keeps those free DVDs. Instead, he has contests on his site for readers to participate in, where the prizes are the free DVDs. What really impresses me is that Chris then goes out and buys the DVD, paying out of his own pocket. I can only imagine how many DVDs he has personally bought. As a reader of Anime on DVD, I feel that I can trust Chris' ratings on DVDs because he has no vested interest in being biased towards any particular vendor.
Another site that I frequent is Tom's Hardware. Tom's gets computer hardware samples from just about every hardware vendor. The site is so popular that vendors are only too happy to keep sending the latest and greatest in hopes of getting widespread exposure. The reviews are honest because hardware benchmarking is highly objective. We readers want to know how many millions of instructions per second a chip can process, for instance. Those numbers have to be reproducible by other testers. I don't know if Tom's keeps their hardware samples or not, but I really don't care, as long as the hardware performance benchmarks are not faked.
Clearly, neither Anime on DVD or Tom's review models will work for my tea reviews. I cannot just send tea samples to people I don't know. If something were to happen to the tea to make the person ill, I could be sued over that. I know that just sounded really paranoid, but in this day and age, it seems like one can never be too careful, sadly. Unlike hardware performance benchmarking, tea review cannot be quantified quite the same way, obviously. I personally dislike lapsang souchongs, but someone else might really like it.
I thought about wine reviews. After all, like tea, wine is a consumable, and the ratings are on a similar scale of subjectivity. Unfortunately, I came across some shockingly unsavory sentiments about the wine industry. Recently, NPR broadcasted an interview with the director of Mondovino.
Mondovino is a documentary about the wine industry. The director noted that there are a small group of well-known wine reviewers who are basically responsible for the generalization of wines. Wine makers are so eager to garner good reviews from these few wine reviewers that they are hiring wine consultants to help. These wine consultants help the wine maker tailor the taste of their wines to please the palate of specific reviewers.
This mass generalization is troubling because unique characteristics of wines based on their origin are being lost. I think this is unfortunate. If I were a wine enthusiast, which I don't claim to be, I would want to enjoy the difference between an Austrailian shiraz and an Italian shiraz. Wouldn't you? Instead we're all going to 'enjoy' shiraz a la SomeWineReviewer. It is hard to take reviewers seriously when they accept expensive vacations paid for by the wine vendors.
I've gotten off the track a bit, but my point was that I don't want what's happening to the wine industry to happen to tea. Oolongs from Taiwan taste different from oolongs harvested in China. It should stay that way. I think a lot can be learned about a certain culture and its people by the way the tea is grown and processed. Those are good things not to lose sight of.
Since there's no other review model I found satisfactory for my tea review purposes, I'm going to create one of my own. Seeing as how I've already inadvertantly received free tea samples, I will allow those now. However, my reviews of free samples will contain a 'full-disclosure' note linking to this page. I intend to be just as unbiased with free samples as I am with personally purchased samples. I may even give some samples away to personal friends and order the same tea from the vendor to review. This will likely not be doable all the time because tea is harvested seasonally, and the supplies can sometimes sell out for the season. But readers should be rest-assured that I will fully disclose whether I ended up buying the tea separately or not.
As always, I do not intend to make a living off of reviewing teas. I already have a great job where I get to work with computers every day AND get paid to do that. I'm really just an engineer who enjoys drinking tea and sharing my thoughts about the ones I come across. Hopefully, I can contribute to making tea drinking more popular in the US.
Posted by Kathy at May 11, 2005 11:46 PM