Butterbeer grossness

Being an avid reader of the Harry Potter series, I've always wondered what Butterbeer tastes like. That, and my wife had been pestering me to give it a try. However, after the pink beer incident and of course the Esplanade Explosion beer, I was really quite leery of doing anything too adventurous. In the end though, curiosity gave in. And I tried making my version of Butterbeer.

A quick search online will show that many others had thought about this before. Suggestions range from adding real butter to your beer (which will of course be disgusting), to deliberately causing a buildup of diacetyl in the beer. The easiest suggestion was simply to spike a base beer with buttermilk essence, which was exactly what I did.

I started with a rather nice Ordinary Bitter (hey, Hogwarts was somewhere in the UK wasn't it?) and placed different concentrations of buttermilk essence in samples before tasting them. Let me say this with gusto - THEY WERE ALL GROSS. I poured all of them out, and now I'm stuck with a jar of buttermilk essence that I have no use of!  They all tasted like a very bad mix of butter popcorn, mashed with the beer and then fermented badly - if you can imagine what that tastes like.

Oh Rowling, I believe you totally lied about the butterbeer!!