A Refreshing New Arrival: Siren’s Sparkling Hopwater Lands in M&S

Fancy something sparkling, refreshing and a little different? Siren Craft Brew’s Sparkling Hopwater has arrived in M&S, bringing a fresh option to the growing world of alcohol-free drinks.

The Berkshire brewery’s Krush variety is now available in 440ml cans in 179 M&S stores nationwide. 

That puts this drink within reach of more shoppers looking for something beyond the usual soft drinks.

So, what exactly is hopwater? Think sparkling water with the flavour and aroma of hops, the ingredient familiar to beer lovers. 

Siren’s version contains 0% alcohol, zero calories and zero sugar, making it an appealing choice when you fancy a refreshing drink without the booze.

And while the name might suggest something bitter, Siren describes Krush as having a sweet fruit note, with a clean, effervescent finish. 

That fruity character comes without sugar, offering a different sort of refreshment for anyone keen to explore new flavours.

The inspiration for Siren’s range came during a trip to Oregon’s hop harvest in September 2023. Head brewer Sean Knight and founder Darron Anley noticed growing enthusiasm for hopwaters among American brewers and hop growers, who were exploring ways to use hops beyond traditional beer.

Siren launched its own UK range in 2024, initially producing Nelson Sauvin, Citra and Idaho versions. Now, the M&S listing gives hopwater a chance to reach a much wider audience.

Commercial director Andy Nowlan says the drink has already become a staple in Siren’s bars and an important part of its range. He also praised M&S for backing a product that remains relatively unfamiliar to many British shoppers.

For those curious to compare varieties, Citra is currently available directly from Siren online and at its venues. Nelson Sauvin is expected to return online and in venues soon, according to the brewery.

Based in Finchampstead, Siren has been brewing since 2013 and has built its reputation on modern beers packed with flavour. Its move into hopwater brings that interest in hops to a drink suited to a different occasion.

Whether you are taking a break from alcohol, planning an evening or simply bored with your fizzy drink, this could be something to pop in the fridge and try.

Here at That’s Food and Drink, we welcome more choice for people who want an interesting alcohol-free option. A sparkling drink with hop character sounds like a refreshing addition to the shelves. Will hopwater find a place in your shopping basket?

We must confess to having developed a taste for Siren's beers. As for hop water? We'll check out our nearest M&S branches soon!

Bod Café Bars. Where Coffee Shop Meets Proper Pub

There is an interesting middle ground between the traditional pub and the modern coffee shop, and bod café bars have made themselves very comfortable in it.

Created by Stoke-on-Trent’s Titanic Brewery, the bod concept was planned in 2017, with the first venue opening at Weeping Cross in Stafford in 2018.

The idea was refreshingly straightforward: create a relaxed, comfortable place where members of the local community could meet, eat, drink and socialise.

Today there are bod café bars in Stafford, Stoke railway station, Trentham, Newport in Shropshire, Stone, Alsager, Matlock and Lichfield.

What we particularly like about the idea at That’s Food and Drink is that bod doesn't seem to worry too much about whether it is a café or a pub.

And why should it?

You can call in for a locally roasted coffee, meet somebody for brunch, enjoy a pizza or settle down with a proper pint. At Stoke railway station, for example, travellers can grab coffee, snacks and cakes to take away, while those with more time can enjoy cask and keg beers, wines, spirits and other drinks.

The local emphasis is particularly welcome. Bod says its beer comes from Titanic Brewery, its ground coffee from Staffordshire-based Chartley Coffee and its crisps from Just Crisps near Rugeley. Fresh produce is also sourced from Freshview Foods in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

There is a strong sustainability element, too. Bod uses recyclable takeaway cups, offers a discount for customers bringing reusable cups, avoids plastic bottles for cold drinks and even makes used coffee grounds available to customers for garden composting.

Some of the buildings are worth visiting in their own right. Bod Trentham occupies a former NatWest bank in a building dating from the mid-19th century which was originally designed as a police station. Meanwhile, bod Newport occupies another former bank and retains features including its old vault and cash lift.

Perhaps the biggest attraction, though, is the flexibility of the concept. Coffee shop in the morning? Certainly. Somewhere for brunch? Yes. A pint of locally brewed beer later in the day? Absolutely.

In an age when so many hospitality businesses seem determined to fit into a narrowly defined category, bod demonstrates that a neighbourhood meeting place can be several things at once.

And perhaps that's exactly what the modern British café-bar should be.

Find your nearest venue and current menus at the bod café bars website https://www.bodcafebars.co.uk

Britain’s Love Affair with Italian Food Keeps Trade Flourishing

Remember being told by some anti-Brexiteers that if the UK voted for Brexit we wouldn't be able to enjoy Italian foods or wines at home? It turns out that this has not been the case.

Because from pasta suppers and pizza nights to a good espresso or a glass of Italian wine, Britain’s enthusiasm for Italian flavours shows little sign of fading. 

Now, the latest trade figures underline just how valuable that relationship has become.

Analysis from the Economic Observatory of Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, updated in June 2026, shows that food, beverages and tobacco were Italy’s largest export category to the UK in 2025. 

Together, they were worth €4.56 billion, accounting for 16.9% of Italian exports to Britain. Although the category includes tobacco, the figures highlight the commercial importance of products associated with Italy’s internationally recognised food and drink culture.

The wider trading relationship is substantial, too. Bilateral trade reached €34.5 billion in 2025, with Italy exporting €26.99 billion to the UK and importing €7.5 billion of British goods. That left Italy with a trade surplus of almost €19.5 billion.

Trade has continued into 2026, with Italian exports to Britain reaching €8.64 billion between January and April, producing a further surplus of €5.93 billion.

For British food retailers, restaurant operators and importers, these figures help explain why relationships with Italian producers remain commercially important. The UK was Italy’s sixth-largest export market in the first quarter of 2026, accounting for 4% of its total exports. Italy also ranks as Britain’s seventh-largest supplier, with a 3.3% share of the UK import market.

Of course, bringing products across borders involves more than finding something delicious. Businesses must also manage trading requirements and establish reliable connections. One initiative helping suppliers and buyers make those connections is OpportunItaly.

Launched in May 2025, the platform reports generating nearly 170,000 qualified leads. It offers business matching, export guidance, market reports and trade opportunities across ten strategic Made in Italy sectors, including agri-food, and 20 international markets, among them the UK.

Its “Trade Fair Beyond the Trade Fair” approach aims to keep conversations going after exhibition stands have been packed away. During 2026, it supported Italian exhibitors at LAMMA Birmingham and IFE London. Meanwhile, its Buyers Club provides tailored support, manufacturer introductions and access to leading trade events.

For food lovers, the attraction is straightforward: opportunities to discover Italian products and the people behind them. For businesses, stronger connections could help turn that appetite into lasting partnerships.

Britain’s affection for Italian food is familiar. These figures show that it also remains a significant ingredient in the trading relationship between the two countries.

Bunta Beer Reports 40% Growth as It Rethinks Britain’s Beer and Curry Pairing

Beer and curry have long been a favourite British pairing. 

But as Indian dining becomes more varied, adventurous and sophisticated, should we give a little more thought to the beer in our glass?

British-Indian alcohol-free brand Bunta Beer thinks so. Ahead of National Curry Week, which runs from 5–11 October 2026, it is encouraging diners to reconsider the familiar drinks traditionally served alongside Indian food.

Founded by Gunikka Ahuja, Bunta was created to offer a contemporary alternative to established curry-house beers. Ahuja moved to London from Los Angeles, bringing her Indian heritage and international experience to a brand designed around food, flavour and changing drinking habits.

The business reports 40% year-on-year growth, with new accounts spanning restaurants, hotels, pubs, independent shops and specialist drinks businesses. Recent additions include the Royal Albert Hall, Novotel, Pahli Hill, Mandira Kitchen, Bombay Bustle and The Gladstone Arms.

That expansion reflects Bunta’s belief that the drinks menu deserves the same attention as the food menu.

Across Britain, diners are exploring regional Indian specialities, street food, contemporary restaurants and premium meals at home. For Ahuja, this growing curiosity presents an opportunity to rethink what accompanies those dishes.

Bunta describes its beer as alcohol-free, with low carbonation and flavours developed to complement Indian cuisine. That could appeal to anyone seeking an alternative drink for their next curry night, whether dining out or eating at home.

Pairing beer with Indian food involves more than finding something cold. Bitterness, malt, body and carbonation can influence how a drink works alongside chilli, creamy sauces, fragrant spices and smoky tandoori dishes.

A rich curry and a fiery dish may therefore call for different qualities in the accompanying beer.

For National Curry Week inspiration, Ahuja recommends the comforting Saag Murgh at London’s Bombay Bustle, and the Masala Haddock Bun at The Latimer, featuring battered fish, lettuce, cheese and tartare sauce.

Her choices also include Pahli Hill’s fish curry with green mango, coconut and tamarind, plus dishes at Oudh 1722 and The Gladstone Arms.

Of course, readers can experiment closer to home too. Your favourite takeaway, a homemade curry or a regional recipe could provide the opportunity to explore an alcohol-free pairing.

Bunta’s message is straightforward: as Indian food continues to evolve, the drinks served alongside it can evolve as well.

Perhaps this National Curry Week, the most interesting change will be what you pour alongside your dinner.

Find out more at buntabeer.com.

Quorn Brings Its No Artificial Ingredients Range to the Chiller

When the family diary fills up with work, school and after-school activities, getting dinner on the table can feel like another appointment to squeeze in. 

Having a few versatile ingredients ready in the fridge certainly helps.

Quorn is expanding its No Artificial Ingredients range with two chilled additions: Quorn Chilled Pieces and Quorn Chilled Mince. 

Both are designed to make everyday meat-free cooking quicker and easier, whether you fancy something spicy, comforting or simply straightforward.

The Pieces contain just three ingredients, while the Mince contains four. According to Quorn, both products are high in protein and fibre, low in saturated fat and gluten free, with no artificial ingredients.

They also cook in under ten minutes, although the time needed for your finished meal will depend on the recipe. That makes them handy starting points for busy evenings when everyone seems to arrive home hungry.

To celebrate the launch, Quorn has teamed up again with top nutritionist, author and podcaster Rhiannon Lambert, who has created two family recipes using the new products.

Her One Pan Enchilada Rice uses Quorn Chilled Pieces alongside warming Tex-Mex flavours. It sounds like an appealing option for anyone who enjoys a satisfying dinner with less washing-up afterwards.

For those who prefer a comforting classic, Rhiannon’s Hidden Veggie Lasagne features Quorn Chilled Mince. It can be prepared ahead, batch-cooked and frozen, helping households get a head start on particularly hectic evenings.

Rhiannon’s message is that nutritious family cooking need not be complicated. Her recipes bring together protein, fibre and plenty of vegetables using familiar ingredients and achievable methods.

She also encourages shoppers to consider a product’s nutritional value and its place within the overall diet when assessing meat alternatives, rather than relying solely on labels or broad assumptions about processed food.

The expanded No Artificial Ingredients range now includes seven products. Alongside the chilled Pieces and Mince, shoppers can find frozen Mince, Pieces, Strips, Swedish Style Balls and Fillets.

The two chilled additions have a recommended retail price of £2.75 for a 200g pack, with prices set at retailers’ discretion. Quorn lists Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose as stockists from September.

For recipe inspiration, visit Quorn’s Instagram account, or explore its Mince and Pieces pages.

Whether your household already enjoys meat-free meals or simply wants more variety during the week, these chilled staples offer another way to build dinner around familiar favourites. Which would you try first: enchilada rice or a bubbling lasagne?

https://www.quorn.co.uk/products/chicken-style-pieces

https://www.quorn.co.uk/products/vegetarian-mince

https://www.instagram.com/quorn_uk

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Guilty Pleasures: Should We Really Feel Guilty About the Foods We Love?

We all have them. Those foods we know aren't exactly haute cuisine, probably wouldn't impress a restaurant critic, and might not earn enthusiastic approval from a nutritionist... but which we absolutely love anyway.

They're our guilty pleasures.

One of mine is a Greggs Ham and Cheese Baguette. Nothing elaborate or sophisticated. Just ham, cheese, bread and that unmistakable Greggs appeal. 

Given the choice between one of those and some considerably more expensive lunchtime offerings, there are days when the Greggs baguette wins hands down.

But what exactly makes something a guilty pleasure?

The pleasure is obvious. But where does the guilt come from?

A guilty pleasure is generally something we enjoy while feeling that, for one reason or another, perhaps we shouldn't.

With food, that might be because it's high in calories, fat, sugar or salt. But sometimes the supposed "guilt" is about something quite different.

Perhaps it's considered cheap, unfashionable or unsophisticated. You might know perfectly well how to cook a proper Italian meal from scratch, yet occasionally crave a frozen pizza. You might appreciate artisan chocolate but still have an inexplicable fondness for a particular chocolate bar from the corner shop.

Food snobbery can create guilt just as effectively as calorie counting.

What's your guilty pleasure?

The possibilities are almost endless.

It might be chips smothered in curry sauce after a night out. A bacon sandwich with far too much brown sauce. Tinned rice pudding eaten cold. Instant noodles. A crisp sandwich. Fish fingers. A huge bowl of sugary breakfast cereal at ten o'clock at night.

Perhaps it's a kebab, a supermarket sausage roll, cheesy chips, a doughnut, a takeaway curry or eating ice cream directly from the tub.

And let's not forget one of Britain's great culinary inventions: putting something between two slices of bread that probably has absolutely no business being there.

Crisp sandwiches? Chip butties? Fish finger sandwiches?

Absolutely.

Should we actually feel guilty?

Probably not.

There's a big difference between enjoying an occasional treat and building your entire diet around it. Most of us understand that eating a varied, balanced diet is important, but food isn't simply fuel.

Food is also comfort, memory, nostalgia and enjoyment.

Sometimes a particular food reminds us of childhood. Sometimes it's associated with holidays, football matches, trips to the seaside or late nights with friends. And sometimes we like something for the simplest possible reason:

It tastes good.

Perhaps we should retire the expression "guilty pleasure" altogether and simply call these foods pleasures.

So I'll happily admit to my Greggs Ham and Cheese Baguette. (But not the one with salad!)

Now it's your turn!

What's your food guilty pleasure, the thing you secretly (or not so secretly) love, even though you suspect you're supposed to know better?

And more importantly, do you actually feel guilty about it?

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London’s latest lunch queue is for a Caesar wrap

Londoners will queue for a good lunch, but a chicken Caesar wrap might not sound like an obvious reason to stand around the block.

That's exactly what CZER says happened when it opened its first counter in Mayfair.

The idea came from a craving. Hospitality consultant Mairi Livsey wanted an American-style chopped chicken Caesar wrap and struggled to find one in London. She had already thought of the name CZER when a US creator posted online about the same gap in the city’s lunch offering. 

Mairi replied that CZER was coming to Mayfair, although she and fellow founder Marius Baltaitis had yet to secure a location.

That was a bold way to set a deadline! Within weeks, the pair had found an unused counter inside Mayfair Food Fayre, worked out their recipes and hired a team. They shared the process online, and CZER says its introductory post received more than 100,000 views in 24 hours.

The founders had prepared for around 50 wraps a day. According to CZER, demand climbed to roughly 400 a day, with repeated sell-outs and queues long enough to prompt the hiring of a queue manager. The business has since opened a second location on Brewer Street in Soho.

So, what are people queueing for? The menu centres on the Classic CZER and the Picante CZER. Both contain oven-roasted chicken breast, lettuce, Parmesan, croutons and house Caesar dressing. The ingredients are chopped and tossed together before being generously sauced and wrapped to order. The Picante gives the combination a spicier kick.

There is something appealing about taking a familiar salad and making it a substantial, easy-to-carry lunch. Chopping everything together should mean you get a bit of chicken, crunch and dressing in each bite, rather than reaching the end of the wrap to discover all the croutons have gathered there.

Mairi says the response has been “beyond anything we imagined”. Social media may have helped people discover CZER, but its next challenge is keeping customers coming back once the excitement of a new opening has settled.

If you fancy seeing what the fuss is about, you can find the original CZER at Mayfair Food Fayre, near Marble Arch. The Soho branch is at 87 Brewer Street. Given the brand’s history of selling out, an early lunch might be a sensible plan.

Chopped, tossed, sauced. And apparently worth queueing for.

https://www.instagram.com/czerldn/

This Is a 10-Year-Old Whisky. And Compass Box Can Tell You Exactly What’s in It

A whisky called This Is a 10-Year-Old Whisky might sound like it’s stating the obvious. 

But Compass Box has chosen that name for a reason: every drop in the bottle is exactly ten years old.

The London-based Scotch whiskymaker has combined three single malts for this limited-edition release. 

Clynelish makes up 66.5% of the blend, while peated Ardnamurchan contributes 20.2% and unpeated Ardnamurchan the remaining 13.3%. All three spent their ten years in first-fill bourbon barrels.

Why make such a point of their ages? An age statement on a blended Scotch tells you the age of its youngest whisky. Other components could be older, but the number on the label won’t tell you that. Compass Box’s answer is to share the recipe, including the distilleries, proportions and ages, so drinkers know what they’re buying.

That openness is part of the company’s identity. This release marks ten years since Compass Box began publicly calling for greater transparency about Scotch whisky recipes. It’s a pleasingly straightforward way to celebrate: put the full details out there and let the whisky speak for itself.

As for what might be in your glass, Compass Box describes a light, glossy dram with Clynelish’s waxy character and a touch of smoke from Ardnamurchan. Its tasting notes suggest Pink Lady apples, rhubarb crumble and custard on the nose, followed by lemon-iced biscuits, white chocolate, soft apricots and nutmeg. The finish brings buttery pastry, candied lemon and a hint of charred oak. 

That sounds rather tempting on an autumn evening, although tasting notes are always an invitation to discover what you notice.

The whisky is bottled at 50.5% ABV, without added caramel colouring or chill-filtration. There are just 3,610 individually numbered 70cl bottles worldwide. At the time of writing, The Whisky Exchange lists it at £63.95.

For anyone who enjoys exploring what a blender can do with carefully chosen malts, this offers plenty to talk about alongside the dram. And if a friend asks how old the whiskies inside it really are, you can give them an unusually precise answer.

More: www.compassboxwhisky.com | @compassboxwhiskyco (Instagram).