While it’s sensible to assume that the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry isn’t serving Chardonnay to the students in the dining hall, the novels do mention several times that they are drinking pumpkin juice.
Pumpkin juice??
Do people really drink pumpkin juice, on a widespread enough basis that it would be made the standard drink with meals for a fictional private school? Even a magical one?
I assume that magical pumpkin produce better-tasting juice than real ones.
Here’s a recipe for pumpkin juice that actually sounds pretty decent. I would imagine the HP stories refer to something similar.
I drink pumpkin malts and I’ve had pumpkin martinis. I don’t suppose Hogwarts serves pumpkin martinis to the first years though.
I always though that it’s made up as a drink for witches (and wizards) because pumpkins are associated with Halloween.
Right. Like butterbeer. Or cockroach clusters or ice mice. It’s fiction, people, and that includes fictional food and beverages 
Right. People should pay attention to real things.
Well, I think I’ll mix up a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster.
I’m more a jinnan tonix man myself.
Dos buttercervezas, por favor.
Well it’s England, they do eat some weird things! I personally find the idea of eating pumpkin pie or pumpkin flavored coffee kind of weird and those are real…
And speaking of butterbeer, is it supposed to be alcoholic, or is it more like Malta?
Well according to the Wiki it is alcoholic
I have found two recipes for it on the interwebs: One alcoholic (Butterscotch snappes - yum) and one non-.
Cervezas de mantequilla?
I like the sound of buttercerveza better, though.
The Drafthouse makes a butterbeer and serves it whenever they do the Potter movies. It needs something; I’m not sure what. Oh – and I have had pumpkin coffee, which I thought would be utterly vile. It was given to me before I knew what it was. Tasted quite nice actually.
“Bug Juice” anyone? That’s an American staple drink from my neck-o-the-woods.
i figured butterbeer to be something like rootbeer subbing butterscotch for root.
I thought of it like apple cider - which made the alcohol or not question really easy: yes. There’s butterbeer with and without alcohol, just like apple cider.
It certainly wouldn’t be a traditional thing rooted in ancient history, as pumpkins are fairly newly-introduced to these isles - they were unknown here until the discovery of the Americas, where they are native.
In the neck-o-the-woods where my father grew up (western Montana) “bug juice” = soy sauce. It was so labeled on the family bottle, replenished regularly from restaurant packets. Fortunately for tradition, my children now know it by that name.
Back to the topic at hand: assuming that one gets pumpkin juice from the flesh rather from the seeds, &c., it strikes me that you’re gonna have to press a whole heap o’ pumpkins to get any significant amount of it. Without a passel of house elves to do the grunt work, I doubt that it would be a worthwhile enterprise.
I’m reading Harry Potter in Bulgarian right now and butterbeer has been translated as “beer shake”.
Ew.
(My guess for the translator’s reasoning is that the Bulgarian word for “buttter” also means ink and oil, and you can only tell from context what exactly you’re referring to, and here there pretty much IS no context. Still, beer shake?)