Authentic Universal Studios Frozen Butterbeer Recipe

It's finally here!  The coveted Butterbeer recipe episode!  This episode was previously only for our Patreon subscribers, but now it's available to all of our listeners! 

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In this special episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney, Jared shares with us his secret Butter Beer Recipe. Welcome to another episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney. I'm your host, Jared Dryer and today we've got another special episode for you on butterbeer. This is probably the greatest drink that's ever been invented. And if you've been to the Universal parks, whether it's in Hollywood or in Orlando, you've probably tried it. If you've been in the last few years, if you haven't, you need to, it is one of the best drinks that's out there. But today you're probably listening to this podcast because you want to know how to make butter beer at home. That is virtually identical to the parks. I have tried so many different recipes that are out there, dozens of them, and none of them even get close. In fact, there's even one at Starbucks that people are telling me, oh yeah, this one's good. I went and tried it and I didn't like it. It wasn't anything like what you experienced at the park, but we were able to nail it here at a Dryer Dose of Disney. We spent a lot of time, a lot of research on what is actually in the drink. And we broke it down and then we rebuilt it. And in doing so, like I said, we made this imitation perfect. It is exactly like what you would experience in the park. And we're going to share that with you today. So first we want to do some housekeeping. We'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen. We also have it available on YouTube. So there's a video format that's also available and you can subscribe there. And of course, if you find anything of value, we'd love your support at Patreon if you're watching this episode initially in 2022 or early 20 23. It's because you already supported us at Patreon. So thank you for doing that. Eventually we will make this, episode free to everyone else as well. But for those that support us, you guys get early access and you can start drinking your butterbeer. Now. So let's first start talking about what is butterbeer where did this whole thing start and what does it actually tastes like? If you're not familiar with Harry Potter and the Wizarding world of Harry Potter by JK Rowling, It's a series of books. There are seven books. There actually on my bookshelf down here behind me, you can't see them because they're behind the chair that talk about a young wizard, his name's Harry Potter. He gets selected to go to hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry. And he does seven years there and that's what the wizards and witches do to become fully certified as wizards and witches. And it's completely hidden to what they call the muggles, the rest of the human world. And we don't get to see it. So they're doing stuff around us all the time that we are completely oblivious to, including they have their own, places like Diagon alley and Hogsmeade, which are. Towns and areas of commerce where they can buy stuff and whatnot, but they've got a butterbeer. So they've got bars, they've got, the three broomsticks, which is one of the restaurants there. That they actually have out at Universal that you can go to that serves butterbeer. So Harry and his friends all drink this butterbeer they're under age, so it's not alcoholic, obviously, of course, with our recipe, you can make an alcoholic. We'll talk about that. But they don't give a great description in the books, what it tastes like. So when Universal created the Wizarding world of Harry Potter at their parks, they took Liberty. They decided what they thought butter beer should taste like. They did a great job. It's actually very good. It's very sweet. Most people that have tried it have said it's probably the best drink they've ever had. And it comes in three different varieties at the Universal parks. So comes in. A frozen variety, which is probably the most popular. That's the one that most people drink. They have a regular variety. That's not frozen. It's just a normal liquid with the topping on top. Which is my least favorite. And then they have a hot version. Which is actually probably the best one. It's phenomenal. But being that the parks are in California and Florida, usually the weather is already warm out. So you may not want a hot beverage, but if it's ever a cool day or you think I want to try it, I like hot beverages. The hot one is phenomenal. So you definitely want to try that. I will say in the hot sun out there in Orlando. The frozen ones going to cool. You off the best. It's obviously the best tasting. It's our go-to one. We liked the consistency. We like the thickness. We like that. The topping there's a, like a cream topping on top that we'll describe in a minute, it sits on top of it. It's hard to mix in, as you try to mix it, it'll mix in a little bit. But there's definitely two parts to the drink. You're trying both of them. They're great. It's really good if you're in a long queue. So I recommend if you go to Orlando and you're going to islands of adventure, you have Haggard's motorbike, which is an outside queue. That's the place you want to be drinking a butter beer while you're waiting in line, because it's so hot. So couple tips to the butterbeer. When you go to get it, the stands, the carts that are big and red, they have a big barrel on them. You can't miss them. They have two sides. So this is a tip that just astounds me and amazes me. People don't realize that there are two sides to this cart. You don't know how many times I've walked up and I see a line of 10 or 12 people on one side. Waiting for butterbeer and the other side, the workers are just standing there. No, one's going through that side. The line is empty. I will make a beeline go to that side and usually when they see me go four or five, people will jump over there. Universal is different than Disney in the sense that their employees are all great. They're all very nice. They aren't going to go to the other side of the line and say, Hey, come over here. Like Disney would, so there is a chance that when you see those carts check both sides, you could get a really short line. Okay. Outside of that. It is, the hot butterbeer is very difficult to find. So at those stands, you can only get the frozen and you can only get the liquid. The hot one is amazing. It's usually only available in the quick service restaurants, like the leaky cauldron or the three broomsticks, none of the barrel stands have it. And then there's a little tap area out in Diagon alley. It does not have it. So if you want the hot one, you're going to have to go into the three broomsticks or into the leaky cauldron to get that. Okay. So let's describe what it tastes like. So when you're thinking butterbeer I know initially I was like, I don't want anything that tastes like butter. It tastes more like butterscotch. So it's not going to taste like your normal yellow butter. It's going to taste like butterscotch. It's very sugary. So if you have any issues with sugar, I would say, stay away from it. We have friends that have a daughter who's diabetic. When we make our home version, we always tell her dose up before you come, because ours is also extremely sweet and very sugary. All versions. So whether it's hot. The regular liquid or the frozen, they all have a whipped topping on it. That makes it even better. Like I said, it doesn't dissolve in the drink very well. So you get a chance to sample that. It is a high calorie drink. You do not want more than one of these in a day. As a matter of fact, it's so sweet. You probably couldn't handle drinking more than one in a day. We even try to share them between two people just because it's enough that you probably don't want to do it all yourself. Please note, I will give you a fair warning if you are in a hot climate. So whether it's California or Florida if it's hot out. That frozen one will give you a brain freeze very quickly. So what we have found is the hotter it is the quicker and more intense brain freeze is hit on a cooler day. If it's in the seventies or whatnot, you can probably get away with it pretty easily. On those hot 90 degree days, that brain freeze is going to hit you really hard. So keep that in mind. Next they don't compliment food very well. So if you're the type of person that likes to pair things, you're saying, I want this with my dinner. It doesn't compliment food very well. So if you go to the leaky cauldron or the three broomsticks to eat a meal, you're usually going to get the like Shepherd's pie type thing, or you're going to get the rotisserie chicken or the spare ribs. It doesn't go well with that. Know, it's a great dessert drink. It's great for having fun out in the park, walking around. It does not go well with food. Get a soft drink, get a water. Save your money there, you can get it when you get back out. Because of the success of Universal's had with the butterbeer and the absolute craze they've had. Disney's tried to copy it. And relatively unsuccessfully though, I actually like a couple of their drinks. Disney has come out with their own versions. So they've got LaFeu's Brew, at the magic kingdom in Orlando it's in the back by Arial's the ride, the little mermaid ride. There's a little town back there behind Be Our Guest. Where they have a bar back there where you can go get LaFeu's Brew and that one's an apple based frozen drink with a marshmallow and I think mango type topping on the top. That one's very good. I liked that one as well. Butterbeer it's just better. It's much more sweeter. It's butterscotch it. They taste better. They also at Disney have star wars land. So out at Hollywood studios or at Disney land. Both of them have star wars land, and they've actually got a couple drinks in there. So they've got the milk's, the blue milk and green milk, which actually I like my wife does not, they also have one, at their stand, where they do the Ronto roasters and stuff out in Disneyland. That drinks actually really good. It's like a passion, fruit type drink. And it's got great flavor, but it's not frozen. It's very different than butterbeer. And then in animal kingdom, Out in Orlando. in the Pandora land. They've got a frozen drink out there. At a little stand right outside of the flight of passage ride and that one's a pear based drink and it's very tart. But it's got the Boba in the bottom with some fruit juices and those, and it's a good rendition. It's very different. It's. It's extremely different from butterbeer. I can't compare it to that. And it's a great drink. I like that one. All in all butterbeer is a dessert. It is sweet. It is great. It is one of the best drinks I've ever had. Okay. Like I said, I've been online. I've checked out thousands of different recipes. Oh, maybe not thousands, at least hundreds of different recipes. And though I haven't tried them all. I've read through them all. A lot of them are very similar. They are, they're not the same. They are not the same, but we did crack it. Okay. We, and you don't have to just take my word for it. We actually had friends come over. My daughter had a Harry Potter birthday party. They all try to all of our friends who go to Disney. As often as we do. They have said it, this is the exact same drink. All of her friends, one of which you had just gotten back said, this is the exact same drink. So trust me when I say this is as close as they get. Okay. It's not difficult to make it doesn't make a lot. And I'm going to walk you through that here in just a second. But it's not difficult to make you are going to break it up into two pieces into the drink portion. So the frozen portion, which is we do making it as a frozen drink and then you have the topping portion. Okay. So you're going to make those separately. The, One batch. So basically I'm going to walk you through recipe. The recipe makes one batch. It does three. Six ounce drinks, basically. Okay. And you're going to get, and that's as the frozen piece, you're going to get about six ounces. A frozen. Beverage for three different cups, out of the frozen piece. And then you can put topping on top of it and get it up to about eight ounces. Of course, if you need more than that, you're going to need to make multiple batches. Know that we did purposefully make the topping. More. It goes further than the frozen part. And the reason is. A lot of people like to just spoon it and just have it. It goes really well in coffee. My wife says, she's a big coffee drinker. I'm not. And anytime that we make it, if we've got anything left over, we'll save it, throw it in the fridge and then she'll add it to her coffee over the next couple of days. So we purposely did that, so that it goes a little bit further. For our setup. You do not need to have a Margaritaville machine, but we do use a Margaritaville machine. The reason is it shaves the ice? And that actually makes a really good consistency. You can use a blender. Just know that if you use a blender and the way that it breaks up ice, you're going to have ice chunks versus shaved ice. There is a little bit of a difference there. It's not a huge difference. The taste will be identical. The consistency's going to be what's different. Okay. So if you have a Margaritaville machine, we say definitely use that. If you are a huge butterbeer fan and you like this recipe, go get a Margaritaville machine. It is totally worth it. It makes the drink 10 times better. Shaved ice is the way to go. Now alternatives. If you have a snow cone machine or anything like that, you could use that to make the shaved ice. If you're going to use the blender, I would recommend go buy a bag of the Sonic ice. If you go down to Sonic, you can buy a bag of their ice from the actual restaurant. That nugget ice is smaller breaks up better, and it will break up in your blender better than big, huge ice cubes. So here we go. Without further ado, here is the recipe that we have created at a Dryer Dose of Disney for our butterbeer. First, we're going to talk about the drink portion. So the frozen portion. That starts with a 12 ounce can of cream soda. Okay. We buy the generic version from Walmart. That one works just fine. I would imagine any cream soda would work. Almost every recipe you see out there starts with the basic cream soda. That's their problem is they stop with the base of cream soda. There are things you need to add to this to make it taste right. So start with the can of cream soda. Number two, we add in a quarter cup of brown sugar. That will make it obviously sweeter. That definitely helps with the consistency and the flavor and the look, but a quarter cup of brown sugar. Next half a teaspoon. So this is the small one, half a teaspoon of rum flavor. Now, if you wanted to make an alcoholic, I would recommend you could add a white rum in lieu of this. You could take that out and put in a couple shots of white rum. And that would work just fine because it's going to have the same flavor. So we add a half teaspoon of the rum flavor, or again, you can remove that and put in a couple shots of a white rum. Next a half teaspoon again, the small one. Of butter extract. And this was the thing I didn't know, existed. Untill I started playing around with this recipe and, found somebody online, talking about it. And I went to the store and found it, but just like vanilla or all the other condiments, the little, syrups there's one called, butter extract that you can get. So half teaspoon of butter extract. Next three tablespoons. So these are the bigger ones. And by all means, let them overflow, you can go as much as you want. You want the butterscotch Sunday syrup and I'll put up a graphic to show you this. If you're on YouTube. But you want the butterscotch Sunday syrup. I've heard a lot of people talk about using caramel. Caramel doesn't taste the same. The butterscotch is what makes this flavor really kick and really tastes like the one in the park. You want to find butterscotch sundae, syrup. Okay. Do not do butterscotch. syrup like what Starbucks has. Starbucks uses, they have a, like a liquid version. That's not going to taste the same. You want the Sunday syrup? You want the kind, if you go find the Hershey's chocolate next to the ice cream. You want the one that's right next to that. That's the Sunday syrup. The butterscotch it's thicker. It's got a better consistency and a better flavor. It's a stronger flavor. So you want three tablespoons of that. You can overflow them if you want, but we put three. Into the, into this drink mix. And we mix it together. So that's it. So you've got the can of cream soda, quarter cup of brown sugar. Half a teaspoon, the small one of rum flavor, half a teaspoon, the small one of butter extract. Three tablespoons, the big ones. Of butterscotch sundae syrup. And we blend it all together. Okay, so that's your frozen piece. Now let's go to the topping. You start with eight ounces of heavy whipping cream. This is inexpensive. You can get it at any grocery store and you can even get eight ounce cartons. That's what we recommend. That's the easiest, unless you're going to have a whole bunch of people and you need to make multiple batches. Like I said, this recipe only makes three, eight ounce. Glasses of it when it's all finished. So if you have a lot of people, you're probably going to want to double this up. So eight ounces of heavy whipping cream. Next three quarter cup of marshmallow fluff. And this is where a lot of the recipes go awry and they miss this. You want the marshmallow fluff. Now your problem is the consistency is totally different. So we're going to talk about that in just a second. But three quarters cup of marshmallow fluff. You could add a little more if you want a little more of that marshmallow flavoring or take a little away, but three quarters cup of marshmallow fluff. That is also, what's going to help it from getting mixed into the drink. That will keep it separated. Next is a quarter cup of powdered sugar. Okay. Again, like I said, this is very sweet. You've got brown sugar and the main drink, powdered sugar up in the topping. So quarter cup of powdered sugar. Half a teaspoon. So again, the small, one of vanilla.. Just plain vanilla. Again, you can find that in your grocery store, in the condiment. So half a teaspoon of vanilla. And then three to five, whatever suits your flavor. Of, the big tablespoons again of that butterscotch sundae syrup. You want it in both the drink and on the topping. Okay. And then what you want to do is you want to whisk it all together. Now, your problem is this is going to take a few minutes because that marshmallow fluff is so thick. It does not want to mix well with the others. We've had a lot of challenges with that. We've used a hand mixer. The little mini hand blender, my wife used last time. That actually worked well. It went really quick, but in the end, it just, it didn't. Break down the same way. So I recommend take about five minutes. You're going to sit there for a few minutes with that whisk and just keep whisking it around and around till you get it to a smooth. Consistency and get that marshmallow fluff in that whipping cream to the same level. Okay. And from there you're done. You're going to just pour it right on top. We prefer, always serve it with a straw. And the reason you want to serve it with a straw is because the layers don't mix well together. You can use the straw to try to do that. But then you can sample some from the bottom. You can draw some from the top and get it all together in one mouthful. And you're going to just be in delight with how good this butterbeer recipe is. Again. This is basically identical to the parks. I've never seen the park recipe full disclosure. I can tell you though. Side-by-side. You probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two. With the exception we do believe ours is just a tad bit sweeter and it's probably in that, powdered sugar or in that. Brown sugar. So we may be able to back that down just a little bit and hit it a little bit closer. But we like it because it's sweet and we like sweet things. There you have it go out there, try with your family, make that butterbeer recipe tonight. Enjoy it with one another and have a little bit of the parks at home. Thanks for joining us today. Again, we hope that you subscribe to our podcast or onto our video podcasts on YouTube, wherever you're listening to us. Please click that subscribe button, please go onto our Facebook page. You can click follow us there. We've also got our, I can do this all day tip of the day. Merchandise out there on Etsy and you're probably already subscribed to us through Patreon. So we thank you for the support, but if not, you can go support us there and make a donation. Have a magical day.