A Muggle’s Quest For The Perfect Mug Of (Alcoholic) Butterbeer

There’s nothing like winter in New York City to make you want to pour hot alcohol down your throat. Last year, I experimented with a variety of spiced, mulled wines. This year, I’ve been dreaming of butterbeer. And I’m not interested in the kiddie theme park variety made of cream soda and syrup from a squeeze bottle; I want grown-ass woman butterbeer. (Note: I do recognize the irony of this statement, considering butterbeer comes from the world’s most popular young adult fiction series, but I stand by my desire.)

Since Dumbledore taught me that it does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live, I’ve been working very hard to make my dream of hot, alcoholic butterbeer a reality. And I’ve been wildly successful! I have found the perfect butterbeer recipe. Now when I look in the Mirror of Erised, I just see myself holding socks.

Butterbeer ingredients.

Butterbeer ingredients.

Butterbeer Contenders

Although there are literally hundreds of butterbeer recipes out there, only a limited number meet the criteria I’m interested in: must be hot, must be alcoholic. With the aid of a simple summoning spell (Accio Google Search Engine!), I located eight very strong contenders. And then made all of them.

Here are my notes.

Butterbeer_first_4

Left to right: 1. Madam Rosmerta’s Butterbeer, 2. Old Fashioned Butterbeer, 3. Dairy-Free Butterbeer, 4. Butterscotch Butterbeer

1. Madam Rosmerta’s Butterbeer – Hans Haupt

Ingredients: Guinness, butternut schnapps, gingerale, butter, egg yolk, honey, vanilla ice cream, cinnamon, nutmeg

Taste notes: Magical. Sweet but not too sweet, and I absolutely love the cold froth of the melting ice cream in contrast with the warm beverage.

2. Old Fashioned Butterbeer – Obedient Ingredients

Ingredients: Ale, butter, egg yolk, sugar, nutmeg

Taste notes: I can taste the beer in this one. It’s not bad, but recipe-wise, it seems so unnecessary to give measurements by weight. I’m not at Gringotts, measuring gold; I’m in my kitchen, measuring butter. Why can’t we just round that awkward 1 and 1/3 Tbsp butter up to 2 and call it a day?

3. Dairy-Free Butterbeer – Dairy Free Cooking

Ingredients: Dark beer, soy milk, soy margarine, egg yolk, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger

Taste notes: Smooth — which it better be, because the recipe had me whisk it forever. Pretty great tasting, but not really what I imagined butterbeer tasting like. My roommate Taty thinks the flavor is similar to the marshmallows in Lucky Charms. They’re… not wrong.

4. Butterscotch Butterbeer – Pop Sugar

Ingredients: Pumpkin ale, butterscotch sauce

Taste notes: This one has kind of a sharp taste. The butterscotch flavor is strong, to the point of overwhelming everything else. Didn’t love it.

Butterbeer_4_across_2

Left to right: 5. Bourbon Butterbeer, 6. Hard Apple Cider, 7. Three Part Butterbeer, 8. British Ale Butterbeer

5. Bourbon Butterbeer – Tablespoon

Ingredients: Ginger beer, bourbon, apple cider, butterscotch sauce, butter, vanilla

Taste notes: Really good, really alcoholic. Roommate Claudia’s comment: “Sweet baby Jesus, this is the best thing that has been inside me all day.” I would totally drink this drink again.

6. Hard Apple Cider Butterbeer – Food52

Ingredients: Hard apple cider, gingerale, butter, brown suger, heavy cream, sea salt, vanilla extract, whipped cream

Taste notes: Fine, but in comparison to the other recipes, nothing special. Very apple cider-y, like something you’d drink on a hay ride while attempting to chat up Fleur Delacour.

7. Three Part Butterbeer – The Roaming Kitchen

Ingredients: Ginger beer, dark rum, butter, heavy cream, sea salt, brown sugar, fresh ginger, vanilla extract, vanilla bean, fresh nutmeg

Incredible. This is definitely the best tasting recipe. However, the drink is so much work to make! And who has expensive vanilla beans lying around? I feel like that’s an unreasonable request.

8. British Ale Butterbeer – Food in Literature

Ingredients: British ale, butter, yolk, brown sugar, pumpkin pie spice

Taste notes: Sweet. Super creamy. Tastes like pumpkin pie, or maybe a chai latte. Comforting.

Claudia and Taty.

My roommates Claudia and Taty were kind enough to help me drink the massive amounts of butterbeer I produced during this quest. Aren’t they adorable?!

The Winner(s)

The best tasting brew was Cristina Sciarra’s three part butterbeer recipe at The Roaming Kitchen. If you’re a butterbeer perfectionist with the patience to gather all the ingredients and engage in a time consuming, multi-step process to create liquid heaven, this is your recipe! Go forth.

That said: runner-up Hans Haupt’s recipe for Madam Rosmerta’s butterbeer is almost as good as the three-parter, but there’s way less work involved. Like, okay: this butterbeer is the taste equivalent of sitting in front of a lit fireplace in the Gryffindor common room, sharing a blanket with Hermione and chatting about your favorite books. The other butterbeer is the same experience, but you can see Crookshanks out of the corner of your eye and it looks like he’s coming over to let you pet him. Does that make sense? Both are excellent options, and in either case, you will have a very enjoyable experience! One is just slightly better, and you might not even think so, depending on how you feel about cats. So due to my strong feelings about diminishing returns (and dismayed incredulity over the cost of vanilla beans), Madam Rosmerta’s butterbeer is what I’ll be adopting as my personal house recipe.

Third place goes to the Tablespoon’s bourbon butterbeer. This is the one you want to drink if you’re trying to get warm-and-fuzzy, fall-down, think-you’re-a-wizard drunk. No judgment. We’ve all been there. And truly, we are all winners when there is any variety of hot alcoholic butterbeer to be had.

IMG_0327

Best Butterbeer Ever Recipe

adapted from Madam Rosmerta’s Butterbeer on Hans Haupt

Ingredients

  • 200 mL gingerale (I like Reed’s Premium Ginger Brew for its extra ginger-y kick)
  • 100 mL Guinness
  • 85 mL butterscotch schnapps
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 2 Tbsp honey
  • 1 Tbsp butter
  • 1 scoop vanilla ice cream
  • a pinch of cinnamon
  • a dash of nutmeg
  • Optional: additional freshly grated nutmeg for garnish
  • Optional: dark rum to taste
  • Optional: homemade butterscotch sauce to coat the bottom of your mug

Instructions

  1. Pour the gingerale and Guinness into a deep set pan over medium heat. While you’re waiting for it to boil, whisk the following ingredients together in a separate bowl: egg yolk, butterscotch schnapps, honey, cinnamon and nutmeg.IMG_0307
  2. Constant vigilance! When the gingerale-Guinness mixture reaches a boil, immediately remove it from the heat.
  3. Ladle a spoonful of the hot brew into your egg yolk mixture. Mix, then repeat several times. The objective here is to bring up the temperature of the mixture without cooking the eggs.
  4. After five or six large spoonfuls, pour the egg mixture into the pan with gingerale and Guinness. Set the heat to low and let it simmer for five minutes.IMG_0299
  5. Add butter and whisk. Once it’s melted and completely incorporated, turn off the heat. You can add dark rum to taste at this point, if you like your butterbeer on the boozier side.
  6. Pour into a mug and serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. If you want to fancy it up, a spoonful of homemade butterscotch sauce on the bottom of your mug is a nice addition. Freshly grated nutmeg on top of the ice cream is also awesome, if you have it!

Cheers!

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Laura Mandanas

Laura Mandanas is a Filipina American living in Boston. By day, she works as an industrial engineer. By night, she is beautiful and terrible as the morn, treacherous as the seas, stronger than the foundations of the Earth. All shall love her and despair. Follow her: @LauraMWrites.

Laura has written 210 articles for us.

64 Comments

  6. “…sitting in front of a lit fireplace in the Gryffindor common room, sharing a blanket with Hermione and chatting about your favorite books.”

    This whole article is a gift; thank you! Really want to try a butterbeer now; great job to you and your roomies in the test kitchen. Did you see Dobby? :^D

    • When I see the word Dobby written on an Autostraddle comment I automatically assume we’re talking about Heather’s Dobby Bobbi EVEN THOUGH I’ve been rereading the series and know very clearly who Dobby is.

  8. When I read the headline my first thought was a very loud “YES!” and the article did not disappoint.
    I have a real vanilla bean or two hiding out in my pantry, btw.
    For panacotta: One of those desserts for people who can cook but not bake.

  12. This had me giggling in a library. If Madam Pince were here, I would have definitely gotten a dirty look! Great recipe roundup!!

    • That’s kind of how i feel, but is it not cooked in this last recipe? Like it would get cooked in custard maybe. (This might just be my denial speaking so i can enjoy the butterbeer.)

    • Yeah, it’s in a lot of the recipes! I saw one where they substituted egg whites instead of egg yolk, and that seemed to work out okay.

      As far as I can tell, the egg yolk is for texture/consistency reasons (not flavor). So if you wanted to leave it out, it would probably turn out fine. :)

    • I was coming down here to say the same thing! Hopefully, it won’t make much of a difference if it’s skipped…. I don’t think I can either. :)

    • Google says egg yolks are pasteurized at 140 degrees for 3.5 minutes. Simmering water is at boiling point (212 degrees or thereabouts depending on altitude/air pressure), so simmering for five minutes definitely constitutes cooking (and it will have gelled at that point, the cooked proteins are adding body, not slippy gross rawness). I know the recipe has you avoiding cooking the yolk before it goes into the pot. That’s a step called tempering which is common in things like custards. It can be used to keep the egg from getting hotter than you want it to (there’s a lot of textural difference between an egg heated to 140 degrees and a boiled egg), but in this case I think the point is to spread the egg proteins out over a larger area before they cook so that they do not clump up and become terrible little bits of scrambled egg. There also may be benefits to warming it up more slowly. There may be other things going on as well–that’s about the limit of my egg chemistry knowledge.

      So yes, just like custard, definitely cooked. But if it still grosses you out, fair enough.

  18. Mandanas is our Queen/
    Mandanas is our Queen
    She’s magical, don’t you think?
    Mandanas is our Queen!
    Mandanas can brew anything/
    She gave us the prefect drink/
    That’s why Straddlers all sing:
    Mandanas is our Queen!

  22. I made your mulled wine recipe last Christmas, and I am totally making this butterbeer recipe this year. Thanks for starting a holiday tradition!

    Also, “like something you’d drink on a hay ride while attempting to chat up Fleur Delacour” sounds like something I want to do every day.

  25. i didn’t know you and claudia were roommates! THAT’S SO CUTE I’M IN LOVE WITH IT. also, this post!

  27. I know this is besides the point of this post, but which of those recipes do you reckon could adapt to a non-alcoholic version? Trying to get boozeahol here is more trouble than it’s worth and the non-alcoholic versions I’ve had were mostly sugar.

    • (For reference: I really like bourbon and can appreciate a good warm cider, and I’ve had Guinness+ice cream floats that were amazing. Hot toddy type drinks in general are my jam. Beer is OK but I haven’t tried beer as an ingredient in a larger drink.)

    • I’d actually recommend the bourbon butterbeer! Just use regular apple cider, and don’t put bourbon in it. :)

  28. Sweet Cornish pixies, this is why I love Autostraddle. I’ve been searching for a solid recipe for weeks and suddenly it’s all plopped into my lap with boozy, Harry Potter asides to boot.

    Thanks, Laura! :D

  30. I never realised how much I wanted to sit in front of the fire in Gryffindor common room discussing books with Hermione before RIGHT NOW.

    • SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!

      I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these recipes since this article came out. If someone actually handed me one of these butterbeers I would seriously be considering proposing marriage, heheh. So, even though I’m working through Christmas this year, I’m gonna spike some hot apple cider with bourbon and put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, and say a little Cheers to you, Heather “Hogwarts” Hogan.

  31. If I wasn’t in Australia where it is forecast to be 33 degrees (90ish degrees in American) on Christmas Day, I would be making this and sipping it by the fire place. Can’t wait to try these out in colder weather.

  33. I just got the ingredients today; gonna make a bourbon version for my New Year’s Eve beverage. SUCH EXCITE I have been thinking about these recipes since you posted this, Laura! Definitely put the Netflix fireplace on my computer screen, fuzzy blanket on my couch, non-allergenic plush animal friend for company and a Harry Potter book in my non-beer hand. Cheers!

  34. So I’ve had this article saved since it was posted, and I finally got around to making some butterbeer this weekend! I made the Madam Rosmerta’s recipe, and let me tell you, it was delicious. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for showing me the way to true butterbeer heaven.

  36. I noted your comment about the cost of vanilla beans. I just found an interesting ‘substitute’ for the whole bean, at (of all places)WalMart, near the Wilton baking supplies. It is natural Madagascar bourbon vanilla bean paste, put out by Lorann Gourmet. One Tbsp. paste= one bean. Just under $7 for a 4fl. oz. bottle. Hope this helps!

  37. This article is super old but my friend and I just finally got around to trying it, we made the bourbon butterbeer from #5 and it was pretty damn good without taking too much effort but I’m a bit confused about why y’all thought it was so boozey, it really wasn’t that strong haha.

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