I’ve been buying different butter each time I shop.
Not sure why, but I always regarded Kerrygold as a product that was selling on brand strength rather than any intrinsic property. Happy to have been wrong about that - it’s discernibly more ‘buttery’ in flavour than some of the other butters I have tried recently - so it’s a good choice when a prominent buttery flavour is desired.
I came into this thread to raise a similar point - I’ve noticed in the past on this board that Kerrygold is held up in high esteem in the US, which has always puzzled me - I’ve always regarded it as just another mass market butter. No difference in price from anything other than the very cheapest own brand butters either.
I tend to lean English or French in my butter choices.
I’m a big fan of Kerrygold, and buy it in quantity at Costco to throw in the freezer. But I only go to Costco every 3-4 months, so I usually run out and end up using whatever I can buy at Safeway, too (typically Meadowgold - a Hawaii company - or Lucerne or Darigold). Whatever I have on hand I use both for cooking and for straight-up consumption on bread or in oatmeal.
Kerrygold is definitely superior to the other brands I buy, but I don’t obsess on it. In a perfect world it would always be my first choice, but I don’t agonize when I don’t have any.
I think perhaps we’re spoilt for choice here in the UK; without very much effort, I can get butter from pretty much anywhere in Europe - not necessarily a broader region than the USA, but probably a bit more diverse in terms of dairy herds and practices.
Of the butters in my supermarket, i find land-o-lakes unsalted to be distinctly better than the other brands. I have no idea why.
I really like Cabot cheeses, but their butter isn’t as good as Land-o-Lakes.
I don’t usually buy Kerrygold, maybe because my regular market doesn’t carry it. But it is a tasty butter.
A few years ago my wife & I were in Ireland, Cork, to be specific. And believe it or not there is a ‘butter museum’ in Cork, sponsored I think by Kerrygold. We went to it & it was actually quite interesting. But the thing that cracked us up was a showing of some old TV commercials for Kerrygold from the fifties or sixties. And a catchphrase in one of them was a saying “Kerrygold is too good to cook with. Please don’t cook with Kerrygold”! Needless to say this has become a standing joke in our kitchen. You’re not Cooking with Kerrygold, are you? Shame on you!
We’re more or less like you; “fancy” butter like Normandy butter or Kerrygold is typically for use on bread or bread-type things like biscuits. The higher butterfat regular butter like the HEB Central Market European Style (82% butterfat), or Plugra are used when we’re really trying to impress in something that uses butter as an ingredient.
Most of the time, it’s store-brand butter, or Land o’ Lakes if it’s on sale for everything though.
Same thing with olive oils- 80% of the time, it’s Wal-Mart or Kroger “olive oil” for cooking, and the other 20% of the time, we use boutique extra virgin olive oils for finishing, when the flavor actually makes a difference. I’m partial to Texas Hill Country Olive Company products in general, but right now we’ve got some sort of spiffy Italian artisanal oil from Torri di Barratano that we bought at the local Italian import store.
I haven’t tried it, but Land O Lakes now sells a “European style” butter with 82% butterfat. But I suspect it won’t quite be as good as the Kerrygolds and the like, as the flavor of the butter depends a lot on the feed, and I suspect this will just be just higher fatl butter from grain-fed cows. Aldi has an Irish butter that is pretty close to Kerrygold that I just bought yesterday. I think it’s quite good, but at $2.99 for 8 oz, I don’t think it’s that much cheaper than Kerrygold (my usual grocery often has Kerrygold on sale for that price, maybe even $2.50 each.)
One of these days I’ll have to do a proper “butter-off” and taste a few side by side – maybe do it in a few rounds. As I said above, my preference is Finlandia, but I’ve never tried it compared with Kerrygold, Plugra, regular store butter (as a control), and one of the Amish butters. The Amish butters I’ve had didn’t taste much different than store butter, but I’d like to try again.
I’m a big fan of Celles sur Belle and Isigny Ste. Mere salted butter for eating with bread. They’re both from Normandy in France, are both cultured butters, and IIRC both use slightly coarse sea salt, so there are tiny salt crystals occasionally in the butter.
Kerrygold is good, as is Somerdale (English), but AFAIK both are sweet cream butters, so they’re more akin to the US butter than the Normandy ones.
Yeah, they’re not cultured. I’ve had the French cultured ones and I love them but my usual grocer doesn’t carry them. As I said, when I’m bored I actually make my own (it’s not difficult, but it won’t be as good as from a creamery with access to really good milk.)
When I was 21, I was passing through Paris on my way to England. I spontaneously decided to spend a day there, so I hopped off the train and one of the hotel drivers quoted me what I thought was an absurdly low price for a place to stay near a Metro line. Weary as I was, I took him up on the offer and was bused off to some inn in a city I didn’t know. I was mostly convinced I was going to get scammed, but I didn’t care. (I wasn’t scammed. It was a perfectly nice single room for the franc equivalent of about forty bucks at the time, 1996).
The room included free breakfast. As an American, I could not muster any excitement for continental breakfasts, but I went and had my baguette, butter, and beverage. As soon as the buttered baguette hit my taste buds, a huge smile formed across my face. I could not believe how good something as simple as bread and butter could taste. It was a true epiphany and I pondered for a moment whether man can live on bread alone, provided a French baguette and French butter. To this day that remains one of my most memorable breakfasts.
That’s a nice story. It reminds me of when I was about 14 and my parents and I went to Quebec. Our hotel stay included a continental breakfast, but my parents were figuratively and literally having none of it, sniffily expressing their disapproval. To this day I don’t understand it. (Do Americans still look down on a continental breakfast, or have things changed?) Anyway, I thought the breakfast was pure bliss. And I think that may have been the exact moment when I fell in love with drinking a morning cup of coffee.
Well, two things there: Americans like their hot breakfasts, like scrambled eggs (usually terrible anyway the way they make them at most mid range or lower hotels), sausage links, pancakes, waffles, bacon, sometimes you might even get biscuits and gravy, etc. There’s also typically a selection of cereals, juices, milk, tea and coffee. We like the cooked stuff.
Second, what I knew as continental breakfasts growing up were usually seen as low tier breakfasts and found only at budget places, as far as I remember. It’s basically just the cereals, toast, bagels, and drinks. It’s often not any fancier than that. Maybe some jam and some fruit, but I don’t even remember cold cuts and cheeses that you would see at European continental breakfasts. And it’s all cheap stuff (not that the American breakfasts were a much higher grade of food.)
So it’s seen as cheap and I would say not filling. Oh, and I missed your actual question, I don’t think attitudes about this have changed.
As a low-carb eater, a “continental breakfast” is synonymous with “an empty plate”. So of zero value or attraction to me.
Obviously plenty of Americans lurves them some carbs, even better if sugar-coated. But even then, cold continental breakfast is seen as doing it cheap in the guise of doing it fancy .
I view these as two different things. Perhaps that’s just be being provincial, but whatever.
I had a similar experience in Paris. The wife and I were there for a few days and we’re not generally ones for breakfast. We’d rather sleep in a little on vacation and then hit the sights directly. But this time we decided to pop into this little corner cafe down the street from our little hotel which didn’t have a lobby/dining area. Wife grabbed a cappuccino and shared a couple croissants with butter and jam. They were simply incredible, and this wasn’t even at what I’d call a bakery. It served coffee in the AM and beer and wine in the PM, so we had low expectations for the food. The bread was awesome, the butter was awesome, and the jam was awesome. We ended up going back every morning of our stay.
That said, I would never have described this as a “continental breakfast”. Continental breakfast is the low cost, low effort trash that most hotels use to pretend they are serving a meal with your room rate. It’s the dining equivalent of a bag of pretzels on a flight. Perhaps in some European hotels these standard breakfasts are as amazing as that experience we had, but in most cases it’s not. I’ve traveled quite a bit and the continental breakfasts in the States and Europe seem to usually suck equally.
The ingredients for Kerrygold unsalted butter are: Pasteurized Cream , Skimmed Milk , Cultures.
This one just has pasteurized cream and salt on Target’s website:
I’ll have to check. I could swear the last Kerrygold I bought did not contain cultures, but looking online it seems the US market has both a cultured and uncultured version of the product?
Ah, yes, this one is cultured, same website:
So the salted one is not cultured; the unsalted one is. Yet another reason to buy the unsalted. 
Do many Americans eat a hot breakfast at home, regularly? I enjoy an “American breakfast” when I am on vacation and someone else is cooking for me. But at home i have a cup of tea, and some cold cereal with milk and berries.
I don’t know what’s typical, but I make two eggs and one slice of toast quite often. Maybe half the week that’s what I have for breakfast, so I guess that’s regular. I don’t like being too carby for breakfast, so egg is the easiest and quickest. I don’t usually do bacon or sausages, though. That I save for weekends. Weekends are pretty much always some hot breakfast for me. Shakshuka is my current mainstay.
I have no idea what’s typical, but as mentioned above I’m a low-carb eater.
Breakfast for me at home about 99% of the time is one poached egg, a couple ounces of berries, half a high fiber/low carb pita with real cream cheese, and a couple tablespoons of PB. Sometimes I skip the bread and double the fruit then add cottage cheese or plain non-sweetened yogurt to replace the cream cheese. When good avocados are available I add half of one.
I can make that breakfast in 4 minutes flat from entering the kitchen to first bite.
Not me. I never eat anything in the morning. I will eat breakfast for dinner every once in awhile. Usually just eggs, bacon, toast. Really fancy would be hash browns instead of toast.
If I had to eat poached eggs, I would probably never eat eggs again. 
To get back on topic, I never pay any attention to the kind of butter I buy, but I only use butter for cooking/baking. I don’t spread it on anything.