so my partner is a harry potter fan, from back when What’s Her Face wasn’t obviously a trashy person. i would just like to preface this by stating that i don’t condone the ideas that What’s Her Face espouses, we don’t buy the merch, we pirated the movies and any of her books in my library had been bought from a used book store which resells donated books.
So in the books, there’s a reference to a “butter beer” the kids drink. I’m thinking that this is non-alcoholic as in a ginger beer, or at least not super strong. I wanted to try to make a batch for my partner as a special surprise.
I’m planning on making a batch of this next in the style of an american cream ale with vienna malt as the base, 10% oat and 10% corn flakes, to give it a heavy mouth feel, and adding some vanilla extract and nutmeg for the flavor.
Has anyone here made this before, and if so, how did it go? Any pitfalls to watch out for?
You must log in or # to comment.
The clones i read about all had butterscotch flavoring as well. Spanish Marie has a butter beer sour that is good. I think they use ice cream in it
I had some at Harry Potter World. It was a fucking horrible caramel flavoured milk shake type thing. You are best off coming up with your own recipe rather than trying to emulate what corporate PR dweebs at Universal Studios UK think it should be.
https://www.morebeer.com/articles/Diacetyl_formation
Basically do the opposite of what this article suggests.
Use caramel malts, repitch a highly flocculant yeast, ferment at warmer temperature, use a significant portion (~33%) of unmalted cereal grains, propagate your yeast using bakers media.
lol came here to write this. No-brainer, really, you could have all the butterness in the world easily by being naughty!
All I can say start with small batches. The random variants I tried over the years weren’t great. None of them. But that was mostly warm stuff with beer in it and cream added or things like that. And warm beer on it’s own is quite an unwelcome explosion on my taste buds. I think I’ll stick to (cold) malt beer if I want something sweet. Or stout if I want something creamy.
I tried making butter beer, which is real thing that was sometimes made, but it probably isn’t what you think.
It is more of hot wine style drink. I think someone made yt video that I used as instructions. Yes it is less alcoholic because you heat the beer (which is the base of the drink) and mix in sugar, butter and some other stuff I don’t remember.
I think that it was quite good and could be made in 20min, really good for the colder evenings. I would suggest some neutral tasting beer as a base, I used some store bought lager if I remember correctly - most of the taste is from the other stuff there.
If I recall, they heated the beer with a hot iron poker, which also caramelized a bunch of the natural and added sugars in the drink.
https://www.brewer-world.com/the-history-of-beer-poking/
Traditional recipe here, though they use a pouring method instead of a poker: https://braciatrix.com/2021/12/10/16th-century-butter-beer/
Thanks, much better than trying to piece it together from video!
I wanted to make it again but didn’t got to it, I think I wanted to cut the sugar a bit it was too sweet for me. Also I wanted to try some different beers to see how it impacts the taste.
Tibetans make a butter tea which is more of an oily soup, but might have some inspiration for you.
