As you know in the books Harry and his friends all drink that delectable sounding drink, butter beer. My friend and I were talking about it today on how we thought it tasted like. I thought it was a drink tasting like root beer, only creamier and warm. She thought it tasted like butterscotch. So what do you think it tastes like?
Mods - This is more of a poll, but it’s also about a book so I’m not sure really sure where it goes. Feel free to move it if it strikes your fancy.
Carbonated butterscotch is the major flavor.
I’ve always figured it was like “butter scotch” but with less of a kick (scotch/beer, see?) 'cause it’s for kids. (Yeah, I know, beer isn’t for kids. Whatever.) The one I wonder about is “pumpkin juice”. I’ve never met a juicy pumpkin yet. It’s like “banana juice” – you know what it would taste like, but how do you get it? I think I would flavor my pumpkin juice (squeeze it!) with a little nutmeg and cinnamon.
Another vote for butterscotch.
Hot buttered rum! Only without the rum. Like the lifesavers.
[QUOTE=look@hergo!]
The one I wonder about is “pumpkin juice”. I’ve never met a juicy pumpkin yet. QUOTE]
Are you kidding? Pumpkin’s main constituent is water!
A while back, I thought up a recipe for butterbeer. It consisted of root beer, cream soda, and butterscotch flavoring. I haven’t actually tried it out, though.
I think it’s a kind of butterscotch rootbeer. I love both flavors, so that sounds like a great combo to me!
Mugglenet.com’s butterbeer recipe.
I am dying to try this!
I’ve always imagined it as having the basic flavor of a melted stick butter, diluted to about 20% with carbonated water, and with a nearly indetectable twinge of artifical alcohol flavor. I can imagine what that would taste like, and it would suck, but it would suck in such an alien and interesting manner that I would be forced to consume it in large quantities. It’s like the concentrated orange juice we have at work, which is so horribly potent, rotten-tasting (one suspects it is perpetually on the verge of fermentation), and impalatably acidic that I cannot help but drink it whenever I get the chance. I figure that if butterbeer tasted like a drink made from butter – especially if it leaves an aftertaste as bizarre as that of alcohol – I’d have to drink it just because of how oddly it sucked.
I also figure the Potter kids would feel the same way. See, half the joy I get from a fictional universe is that I can pretend that explanations like the above make sense to people who aren’t me. 
It might well have a very small alchohol content. It won’t get them drunk or anything, but it could give it a powerful taste.
IIRC, until relatively recently children at British boarding schools drank “small beer”. This has very little alcohol content, and was considered better for kids than plain water. After all, prior to modern sanitation, water could be full of all kinds of nasty disease-causing stuff. The brewing process killed off most of the germs.
I don’t think we are meant to understand that butter beer has enough alcohol for even a child to be affected by it, but apparently a house elf can get sick off it. Too much sugar or caffeine could also make someone sick so this isn’t really conclusive, but I suspect Rowling intends for butter beer to have a trace of alcohol in it.
Anecdotally, my mother once bought one of those “brew your own ginger ale at home!” kits, and the whole family swore that the final result had a faint alcohol aftertaste. I imagine that, like ginger ale and root beer, butter beer is also fermented.
exactly. After all, everyone knows the wizards are all 200 years behind the times. 
I picture it as butterscotch-flavored and very mildly alcoholic, like 1 to 2%. (Winky gets drunk off it, after all, even though none of the kids seem to.) Not really fizzy, because wizards seem to drink it warm in the winter and warm fizz doesn’t sound very appealing, but still a bit frothy, if that makes sense.
Olives aren’t very oily in the conventional sense either but there’re a hell of a lot of bottles of their oil out there.
Another vote for a butterscotch flavor with a mild alcoholic kick…but I also envision it as being bewitched in such a way as to convey a warming effect on the body when drunk.
I’ve always thought of it as the wizarding world shandy - slightly beerish taste, and with the alcohol from beer - but watered down with… cream and sugar?
During one of the trips to Hogsmeade, doesn’t Harry start to feel a bit light-headed from too much Butterbeer? It definitely seems like the drink has some alcohol, but apparently even a child has to drink a lot of it before he starts to get buzzed.
Well, er… yeah. Of course it would. Ginger beer (that is, real ginger beer, not the Canada Dry type abomination) is fermented. That’s what makes it fizzy. You won’t get much alcohol - say 1% if this page is anything to go by.
Anyway, a bit of alcohol isn’t going to do kids any harm. I know that as a baby I was dosed up with gripe water, and that’s on a par with lager in terms of alcohol content.