HB&B Blog

I thought I was bored of New England IPAs. There was a time, like many of you reading this I’m sure, when I found myself in constant pursuit of The Juice. I was lucky in 2016 when I decided to head to Philadelphia to the Craft Brewers Conference, the brewing industry’s largest convergence within a typical calendar year. Once the conference was over, I found myself with a spare day, so – after picking up a box of doughnuts from Reading Terminal Market – I figured out which train would take me to the suburb of Ardmore, and to Tired...

  Early September is always a period of in-between, a time of shift and recalibration. The body has stored up memories of all those years of back-to-school returns. An autumnal coolness can already be detected in the night breezes, though summer isn’t technically over until the equinox. What to make of this time? As temperatures begin to drop, it’s tempting to start cooking (and drinking) like it’s already October, like there are already wood fires burning and piles of leaves on the ground. But this year – a year when summer has slipped by without much fanfare or celebration –...

It is officially 'taps aff' weather. As I write this [in the August heatwave, but feel free to apply it to the current September one - Ed], London is experiencing the kind of damp, muggy heat that oppresses you into a state of near-helplessness. There is nothing you can do about it, and no reason, nor ability, to resist temptation. You must drink lager now, and hope and pray that a thunderstorm of biblical proportions will finally break this hot spell, allowing your brain and body to once again function within some semblance of their normal parameters. The good news...

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...

Over the course of my various travels to the USA, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit parts of the famed Oregon Trail. The 2,170-mile route once connected various towns along the Missouri River to Oregon's Willamette Valley during the 19th century and was used by colonialists seeking fertile land. It looks a little different these days, and traversing it is certainly less arduous, with lots more taco trucks and the occasional branch of Bed, Bath and Beyond lining the roads it once occupied. Still, it’s no less fascinating. I’ve also played the 1971 video game that is designed to simulate the...