HB&B Blog — Germany

By and large I don’t consider myself much of a seasonal drinker. When the mood takes me, I’m as happy smashing stout in the blazing sunshine as I am sipping pilsner in the depths of winter. In saying that, however, there’s something about the extending evening daylight that has me reaching into my fridge for something cold, something crispy, something that has been lagered for weeks on end. There’s a deeply satisfying aspect to finishing work while there’s still plenty of daylight left that goes so well with drinking lager, and I am eager with anticipation when I think about...

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...