HB&B Blog — New Zealand

If I am guilty of one thing every spring, it is of losing my shit over the annual return of wild garlic. I’m aware that I make a slightly parodic picture: The wayward urban forager who runs to that secret patch in the local woodland armed with a pair of kitchen shears, trying to keep my scarf from collecting too much dirt as I hunch over another patch of those glossy green leaves. But I’m happy looking foolish if it means walking away with a big ziploc bag stuffed with the seasonal bounty, trailed by an allium scent cloud that follows...

I’m someone you could describe as being highly Kiwi-adjacent. My partner of the past 13 years is a proud New Zealander, and HB&B supremos Jen and Glenn also hail from there, for whom I’ve been writing this beer column for almost seven years! This has given me a deep affection for Aotearoa New Zealand, and I’ve been lucky enough to spend quite a bit of time there. It is – as you might expect if you’ve ever tasted a beer made using NZ hops – home to a hugely exciting beer scene, particularly in its larger cities such as Auckland and...

There’s a genre of food that I can’t help but categorise as “restaurant cooking”. It’s not because those dishes – the category also includes French onion soup, beef Wellington and grilled oysters, by the way – are impossible to cook at home, nor that they’re not rewarding to do so. It’s not even that they have an inherent fussiness that makes them ill-suited to small urban kitchens. If anything, that classification system is born of a kind of complacency – because I have only ever had these dishes while out on the town (and maybe also because they carry a...

I remember the good old days, when beers were beers. I’m talking about 2012 of course, and trying iStout – the revered imperial stout from New Zealand’s 8 Wired – in a quaint Shoreditch bar that is now part of a large chain owned by a well-known Scottish multinational brewery. This was an imperial stout of stature. One that roared with malty molasses and rambunctiously bitter hops. It may have been very expensive at the time, but shared among friends it was a real treat. We’ve always been lucky to have a small shipment of 8 Wired beers arrive in...

New Zealand as a country certainly knows its way around a high-quality beverage. That’s particularly true in and around Nelson, located at the northern tip of the South Island, where many of the country’s grapes and hops are grown. It’s no accident that that’s also where winemaker Alex Craighead has staked his claim. Alongside his partner Josefina Venturino, Craighead founded two labels – DON Wines and Kindeli Wines – in Martinborough in 2014. Now based in Nelson’s Moutere Valley, most of the fruit used in his Kindeli range is organically and locally grown on parcels of land that he either...