For those of you who have read Harry Potter, you know that
there are not many more things more delicious or comforting than a cup of Butterbeer
in the magical world. So what is really
in this fictional drink? I realize this
is an oxymoron, but it seems worth considering.
My imagination tells me that it is like drinking a warm liquidized
version of butterscotch pudding topped with vanilla whipped cream. It must have some kind of frothy topping. Mmmmm…just
the thought makes me sigh with contentment.
But, let’s get back to the “real” part of my oxymoronic
question. After finishing the Harry
Potter series, the husband and I set forth on a quest of our own: find a reality
of Butterbeer that meets our imagination.
Who knew that there is an entire website
called
The Disney Diner? Except for
Disney, of course. It
is dedicated to creating
a reality out of imaginary recipes (not necessarily from Disney) just like Butterbeer! The husband and I were extremely excited
because the ingredients matched my above description – whipped cream and butterscotch! While the ingredients alone are delicious,
the combination made a rather thick and way too sweet drink. It didn’t brink the mmmm….contentment feeling
I had hoped that butterbeer would create.
Instead, it left me smacking my lips together from the overly sweet
chalkiness and wondering if I would regret drinking it. Perhaps drinking it cold and thinning it with
another liquid would have made it better, but we didn’t try this.
The weird starchy mess that it left behind
in the pot curbed my desire to find a recipe.
So, we thought – “What would Hermione do, if she were here?” She would go to the library and look for a
book on potions (a/k/a cookbooks).
Because we weren’t looking for recipes at this point, but were instead
shopping for the lovely beverage. We decided
to Google “Butterbeer” and were delighted when we found “Reed’s Flying Cauldron
Butterscotch Beer”. And so a secondary
quest began for finding this brand.
We searched the city high and low – Total Wine
and More, John Brooks, Whole Foods, Natural Grocers, Sprouts, Smith’s, and more. While these stores had other Reed’s products,
they didn’t have the Butterscotch flavor that our taste buds required. The more we searched and the less we found, I
decided that this would be the perfect gift for the husband sometime in the
future and made a mental note to keep searching. I returned online to look into having the
drinks shipped to us, but I refused to pay $16 for a 6 pack, plus shipping on
top of that. Because of that price tag,
the search was halted for over a year.
For
Christmas 2015, I decided to buy the husband a lunchbox. What better to go with that lunchbox
than Butterbeer?! And the search resumed as quickly as it had ended. I also realized that it wasn’t necessary to find the Reed’s brand and perhaps something else would work. I walked into World Market with a heart full of hope and wandered around until the orange/brown label of Dang! That’s Good Rootbeer caught my eye. (OK, you caught me. I’m a researcher at heart and it really encompasses my entire being, so I looked it up online first. I knew what I was looking for, but the label still caught my eye. Probably because I was looking for it.) At any rate, I immediately grabbed two of the butterflavored rootbeer bottles and headed to the register where the cashier greeted me happily and nearly jumped up and down as she saw my find. She said that this was her favorite drink and if I liked butterscotch, I would love this. She then proceeded to describe the flavor. “It’s a rootbeer, but it has a butterscotch after taste that isn’t too overpowering, so you can tell it’s still rootbeer, but butterscotch takes care of the bite in the rootbeer.” She wrapped them up and voila, a gift for the husband.
The husband and I drank these on
New Year’s Eve. As you can probably tell by our drink selection, New Year’s Eve
isn’t really our thing. But the soda
just might be. As if this was a fancy
wine, we did a proper test by smelling the bottle before tasting it. It smelled good, sweet, yummy and it tasted
exactly as the cashier had said. The
husband’s response? “This might be my
new favorite drink.” Then he smiled sheepishly
“A new guilty pleasure…”
I guess I should mention at this
point that we stopped drinking cokes over a year ago. So not only was this a treat for finding a
butterbeer like concoction, but it was the gift of sugar. And at 31 grams per serving, it definitely
had a lot of sugar in it! While the
husband was happy, I’m not sure if this met my butterbeer expectations; it did
meet my butterscotch rootbeer expectations though. So, if you like rootbeer and that strange
syrupy yet somehow enticing burning that the taste leaves behind, this is worth
trying.
After I purchased the rootbeer and
had hidden it properly in my closet, the husband and I went to the Cracker
Barrel for breakfast and some last minute gift buying before Christmas. I was looking for this apple crisp gift set
that included fried apples and the crisp mixture. Two shelves down from the baking display, was
the soda display. As I walked past it, I
saw “Flying Cauldron” in purple lettering on a black cardboard holder. It couldn’t be it, could it? After all this searching and then finally
giving up for something else, had I found it?
The husband walked past it 3 times and never even noticed it. Each time I held my breath that and prayed
that he wouldn’t see it. After purchasing the apple crisp packages, he took
them to the car and I made a beeline for the soda shelves. Low and behold! (I was in the Cracker Barrel
Country Store, so I felt I should use exclamations like this!) The Flying
Cauldron Butterscotch Beer was found!! I
contemplated buying it immediately, but knew the husband would see it. It would be better to wait, to surprise
him. And so I stopped by after work one
day, bought the deliciously decorated bottles, and then hid the bottles in the
closet with the others. (Not what you
would expect from a phrase like “hid the bottles,” right?)
When the husband opened his
lunchbox on Christmas Eve, he was in disbelief.
“Where did you find these?” he asked, excitedly. I smiled and said “Cracker Barrel. You walked by them 3 times and thankfully
didn’t see them!” More smiling. We had
to restrain from drinking it right then and there because of Christmas parties
to attend. The bottles tempted us for a
week and then we finally tried them, saving what we hoped to be the best for
last,
The Flying Cauldron recipe is a
cream soda base as opposed to the previously mentioned pudding and rootbeer
bases. It smelled sweet – a combination
of vanilla and brown sugar. It smelled
good, sweet, yummy and it tasted exactly as the cashier had said. The husband’s response? “This might be my new favorite drink.” Then he smiled sheepishly “A new guilty
pleasure…” When I reminded him that was
the exact same he said about the rootbeer, he responded in one breath with “Butthisoneisbetter!
Don’tbemadifIcomehomewitha6packone day.” He took a breath and then asked, “Dotheycomeina6pack?”
I had to laugh at what we were talking about, but said, “If it’s a 6 pack of
cream soda, I can’t complain. You can
buy them in a pack, but they are priced individually.” I was so excited about finding these, that I
forgot to remove the price tags. I
cringed when the husband said “Whoa! These cost $2 each?” Indeed, they do, but that mmmmm…contentment
feeling is definitely worth it.
It tasted just like an old
fashioned cream soda with a deeper butterscotch flavor that danced along with
the carbonation on the tongue. 30 grams
of sugar? Who cares! This might be the
closest flavor humanly, realistically possible to the imaginary cup of contentment
called Butterbeer created for the Harry Potter series. The only thing that might make it better is
ice cream! Who could argue with a
Butterbeer Float?
Quest Complete
For now, the quest is complete, but who knows I may return
to creating my own recipe one of these days!
The idea of something warm is still tempting.
