HB&B Blog — Germany

I've been making a lot of fried rice during lockdown(s). I'm sure I'm not alone. It’s not just that fried rice is cheap, fast, flexible and made using basic pantry ingredients, it's also entirely comforting, can be eaten for any meal and does an admirable job of sopping up the prior night's beer. No fried rice I make is the same, but generally I'll add soy sauce and sesame oil, hot sauce and ginger, garlic and fish sauce; I might eat it with salmon or tofu or vegetables, or just on its own, satisfyingly spiced and glistening with oil. Despite...

I hate surprises. More succinctly,  I hate being surprised. The nanoseconds of horror as your brain veers towards full panic while it quickly attempts to work out if these sudden, unexpected changes are to your benefit or detriment. I am a control freak, I like order and meticulously organised fun. This beer review is a short, rather dull story of how I accidentally played myself. When Jen from HB&B presented me with a list of interesting Franconian and Bavarian beers I’d never heard of, in a moment of haste I picked one with an odd name. Greif sounded tempting, I...

I discovered Jerrelle Guy's recipe for strawberry spoon cake, published in NYT Cooking, several months back – just in time to bring it along to a friend's backyard pizza party when lockdown restrictions lifted. It's not an exaggeration to say that it has single-handedly changed the course of my summer. Everything about this cake encapsulates the dog days of August: it's consummately lazy, comes together in 20 minutes and requires ingredients you most likely already have in your kitchen. This is a cake you could plausibly whip up on a whim if it's late in the evening and you decide...

About a decade or so ago I was really into wheat beers for a brief time. I remember going on a business trip to Frankfurt during my previous career of musical instrument sales and tucking into glass after glass of Schöfferhofer after hours of walking the giant trade halls at the city’s Messe auditorium. There were only two choices in most places we went to anyway, lager or wheat beer, and with most of my colleagues drinking lager, the latter always felt like the most subversive thing to order. I never could resist being the odd one out. Back at...

One of the most joyous aspects of reviewing beer for Hop Burns & Black is when something completely new and utterly surprising lands on my doorstep. That was the case with this beer, from Ettaler Klosterbrauerei, based in the village of Ettal towards the far south of Bavaria. I’d never heard of this brewery before I was sent this, and after only a few sips I was desperate to know more. But more on the beer itself in a moment. First, I want to quickly dig into the idea of seeking out something new, the joy of exploration. With thousands...