Food & Drink

Some people are difficult to buy gifts for regardless of how hard you try. Other people eat and drink well, and care about what they put on their tables. These people, by contrast, are the easiest to shop for if you stop worrying about being different and start worrying about being good. This is the thought process behind this gift collection. We like food and drink gifts for two reasons. One, as soon as you buy them, people tend to use them. Not stash them away. Not hang them on the wall. Use them. Enjoy them. Mention them at dinner parties. Secretly crave more of them some day soon. There’s an honesty about a gift that’s devoured because someone appreciated it. Two; we’ve tried to avoid anything that’s obvious. The build-your-own hamper with three tokens for useful stuff and eight tokens for tat. The bottle of something expensive looking but that nobody actually opens twice. The kitchen gizmo that claims to make your life easier but that nobody knows how to use. We’ve spent many months scouring the best of what’s out there in this world, and let’s just say the standard is greater than most gift roundups will have you believe. So whether it tastes incredibly good, comes from a producer who’s doing something incredible, or is just the kind of thing that someone with a well-stocked pantry would buy for themselves and feel quietly smug about, if it makes the cut here, it’s because we think it’s worth knowing about. That last point is important. Gift shopping is full of compromises. We don’t want to flood you with those. There’s lots of variety here. Things for whisky nerds. Things for food lovers. Things for the weekends. Things for weekday survival. Gifts that come beautifully wrapped. Gifts that’s all about what’s on the inside. We don’t make it all look the same colour because food and drink gifts shouldn’t be about shoehorning everything into the same aesthetic. The best gift is the one tailored to who you’re buying for. Finally, this gift collection will not lead you down dead ends or waste your time with well-presented filler. We’ve all been there. You spend a bunch of time picking out something in this category and the person you give it to nods and smiles and never mentions it again. Life’s too short. If it made this list it’s because we’d hand it over ourselves, bag in hand.

Baking

Ok, so some bake because it’s meditative. Some bake because they like the smell of freshly baked bread to fill their house every Saturday morning in November. Some people bake because their primary love language is feeding people and they happen to be really good at it. Either way, the baker in your life will not be short of passion. And they are probs also owned by ten or twenty recipe books already. But what they might need is something that will make the whole experience even better. That standout tin that makes cakes rise beautifully because it conducts the…

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BBQ

You all know the person. The one that cooks on the grill like its their kitchen. The one who starts mentally preparing meals the night before. The person that has preferences when it comes to charcoal and WILL tell you about them whether you asked or not. Shopping for that person isn’t hard. It just means knowing what they want instead of what looks good in a box. We compiled this collection because we felt there was too much chasing silly gifts on one end and eye-watering price tags on the other. Novelties vs. Professionals. We wanted to hit the…

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Beer

Once upon a time buying beer as a gift was six pack from the local shop, crossed fingers and hope for the best. We believe that people who love beer deserve more. We also believe that the people buying gifts for them do too. We put this gift collection together because whilst beer is now one of the most exciting and actually giftable areas around, most gift sites offer it about as much column inches as a perfunctory nod. We built this with one sort of person in mind. Not the drinking whatever is cold sort of person. We mean…

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Cheese

Some people are wine people. Some people are chocolate people. We like to think the ones who really matter are cheese people. If there’s a cheese person in your life you’ll know that the sorts of things they’re looking for don’t come from a supermarket selection box. They have opinions. Particularly strong ones. About rinds and caves and milk temperature and how long it’s been sitting in a cloth in a Somerset barn. Those opinions aren’t a problem to work around, they’re a feature. Finding them a gift that lives up to them seriously is the challenge. We’ve built this…

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Chocolate

Some will try to tell you chocolate isn't a valid gift. These people are incorrect. The reason people have this attitude is that most chocolate purchased as a gift is lazy. A mixed truffle box from motorway services. Something shiny that looks exciting until you realise it tastes of.. nothing really. Chocolate can be one of the best gifts around, so long as it's done right. In order for chocolate to be done right, it simply has to be really good. That's our starting point for everything here. It needs to taste special. Not interesting, or quirky or ‘artisan’ in…

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Cider

For most people cider = what's served over ice in the corner of the pub garden. Sweet. Cold. Forgettable. We don’t. Drink a single variety cider made with bittersweet apples from Herefordshire or a bottle of wild fermented pear from a Somerset producer making only 300 cases per year and you’ll realise cider has been very seriously undersold for a long time. That’s exactly why we’ve put together this collection. It’s one of our favourite gift categories, because the reaction of the person on the receiving end is always one of pleasant surprise. You offer someone a bottle of real…

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Coffee

Some folks drink coffee. Some folks live coffee. For them, the first cup isn’t optional. The afternoon one isn’t negotiable. It’s just quietly become one of the more serious bits of their day. If you have one of those people in your life, you already know a paper bag of supermarket beans with a ribbon around it isn’t going to cut it. We built this collection with them in mind. That might be the person who has strong opinions about extraction time and water temperature. It might be the person who’s just started to suspect there’s a whole world beyond…

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Cooking

Someone who cooks well is actually one of the easiest people in the world to buy for. Except it almost always feels like one of the worst. We all know someone who has received a gadget that sounds impressive in the shop but lives in a drawer by February, or something so useless they already own three of them. We’ve been given both on numerous occasions and felt bloody terrible every single time. What we wanted instead was stuff that actually improves how you cook. Not novelty. Not theatre. Not the kind of thing you take out once a year…

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Gin

People who love gin are a discerning bunch. They have preferences, strong opinions on tonic, and will instinctively know if you’ve bought a bottle from the bottom shelf and slapped a bow on it. Cheers for telling us, is what I’d say if we were friends. It’s not judgement, it’s helpful intel. It means when you pick the right gift, you really hit the mark. When we started compiling bottles for this list we realised gin has become one of those categories where there’s a huge gap between an incredible gift, and something utterly forgettable. Gift lists seem disinterested in…

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Rum

Rum is overlooked. If you want to gift someone whisky because it’s serious, you grab a rum and dump it in cola at the party. You don’t drink it neat; you buy it duty free in a plastic bag. It’s unfortunate because nothing in this collection is anything like that rum. These bottles are aged, interesting and come with histories that reach back through decades across oceans and island chains. Good rum has history and complexity in abundance. That’s why it makes such a great gift for someone who enjoys drinking. We’ve curated this list because whenever we went looking…

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Tea

We’re all friends with the person who is serious about tea. If you’re reading this and you aren’t, you’ll know who we mean when we publish this. The ones we mean aren’t the “serious about loose leaf instead of bags” types. Although we’re not knocking that if that’s you. We mean the types that have strong opinions on water temperature, that can tell you the difference between a first flush and a second flush Darjeeling, and will politely admonish you if you pour the milk in first. Figuring out what to get that kind of person can be nerve wracking,…

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Tequila

When people think of tequila, they think of the stuff that tastes like a regrettable decision at a student house party. Most people never move past that stage. That’s the tequila that turns people away for decades. With this collection, we wanted to show off the complete opposite. The aged añejos that have far more in common with a fine whisky than a shot at midnight. The small batch blancos that have a crisp minerality that dedicated drinkers hunt down. The reposados that make you thankful you slowed down enough to pay attention. Giving someone booze as a gift is…

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Vodka

Most vodka purchasing decisions are made like fuel purchases. See brand on shelf you recognise, pay for it, leave the store. It should therefore come as no surprise that a well selected vodka can make for a great gift. It immediately lets the person into whose hands you've entrusted it know that you actually gave some thought to the purchase, that you know something they didn't, that you did better than what stock policy dictates comes atop the shelf at eye level at your local supermarket. When we started putting this collection together we did so because vodka has a…

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Whisky

Whisky gifts have a tendency to fall into two categories. Either you know the person really well and have bought something fantastic. Or you’re standing in a shop pondering your options and know the gift recipient will be able to tell you didn’t care all that much. We compiled this list because we wanted to do right by the latter. From the well-stocked shelf of a whisky shop there are plenty of bottles that will suffice. But they’re kind of boring. If you know someone who loves whisky then chances are they know it pretty well too and can tell…

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Wine

Buying someone a bottle feels easy. Until you find yourself in the aisle faced with dozens of rows of bottles trying to remember if they like Burgundy or Bordeaux, if they only drink white, if they’re secretly into Chardonnay, if that £15 bottle you like looks expensive or like you rushed it. We’ve stood in that aisle before. It sucks. So we put this collection together for those who want to gift wine properly; who want to remember that there’s more to opening a bottle than cracked corks and stained carpets. Every bottle, experience and accessory we’ve included here has…

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