Butterbeer.
Until last week I hadn't read any of the Harry Potter series since the weekend of the final book's release, about four years ago, give or take a couple of months. One of my favorite books of all time, The Prisoner of Azkaban, is part of this fantastic collection. This book has everything that I love about Harry Potter: the train, the Marauder's Map, all types of interesting magical gadgets, Hogsmeade, the Dementors, Hagrid getting drunk, hardcore Quidditch, and everything else you might expect from the perfect Harry Potter book. Picking this book up ten years after my first read was sweet and familiar, and I relished walking the halls of Hogwarts with my Gryffindor friends once again. (I must call them friends, and not mates, because I'm a Ravenclaw... as you probably have guessed by now.)
Unfortunately, J.K. Rowling also uses her third book to introduce the single worst aspect of the Harry Potter universe to her readers: butterbeer.
In the book, butterbeer has wide appeal. The students of Hogwarts drink it by the mugful at the Three Broomsticks pub and I always imagined sitting with them, enjoying the warm, frothy concoction on a cold winter's day. Imagine my pleasure when I saw a kiosk beneath a sign that read Butterbeer while on a school trip with my students at Islands of Adventure last May. I queued up like everyone else, and thirty minutes later I held in my hands something that I had been craving in the depths of my imagination for over a decade.
It was frothy, just as I expected. It was cold, which seemed off, but with late spring in Orlando being what it is temperature-wise, was really no surprise. And it was cream soda, which ruined the idea of butterbeer for me forever.
Let me explain to you how much I hate cream soda. If you could create a list of every possible item in the universe to drink, I would rank cream soda second-to-last, right below melted yellow snow and just above whatever's been oozing out of Chernobyl recently. If I was stumbling through the desert, dying of thirst, and I came upon a lake brimming with ice-cold cream soda, I would pray to God that it was a mirage so that I could stay straight and true on my path to certain death. I have not had cream soda since the sixth grade when my mom accidentally bought it for me because it was in a bottle that was nearly identical to my favorite root beer. It was an unintentional cruelty that changed our relationship forever.
Last week, while reading my favorite volume of the Harry Potter series, I turned to the pages describing Harry's first encounter with butterbeer. I tried so hard to reset my imagination to the warm, foamy, buttery-yet-sweet delight that I had cultivated in my mind for so many years, but it was useless. The only thing I could imagine was cream soda. Sadly, I closed the book and set it back on the shelf.
The magic was gone.
Unfortunately, J.K. Rowling also uses her third book to introduce the single worst aspect of the Harry Potter universe to her readers: butterbeer.
In the book, butterbeer has wide appeal. The students of Hogwarts drink it by the mugful at the Three Broomsticks pub and I always imagined sitting with them, enjoying the warm, frothy concoction on a cold winter's day. Imagine my pleasure when I saw a kiosk beneath a sign that read Butterbeer while on a school trip with my students at Islands of Adventure last May. I queued up like everyone else, and thirty minutes later I held in my hands something that I had been craving in the depths of my imagination for over a decade.
It was frothy, just as I expected. It was cold, which seemed off, but with late spring in Orlando being what it is temperature-wise, was really no surprise. And it was cream soda, which ruined the idea of butterbeer for me forever.
Let me explain to you how much I hate cream soda. If you could create a list of every possible item in the universe to drink, I would rank cream soda second-to-last, right below melted yellow snow and just above whatever's been oozing out of Chernobyl recently. If I was stumbling through the desert, dying of thirst, and I came upon a lake brimming with ice-cold cream soda, I would pray to God that it was a mirage so that I could stay straight and true on my path to certain death. I have not had cream soda since the sixth grade when my mom accidentally bought it for me because it was in a bottle that was nearly identical to my favorite root beer. It was an unintentional cruelty that changed our relationship forever.
Last week, while reading my favorite volume of the Harry Potter series, I turned to the pages describing Harry's first encounter with butterbeer. I tried so hard to reset my imagination to the warm, foamy, buttery-yet-sweet delight that I had cultivated in my mind for so many years, but it was useless. The only thing I could imagine was cream soda. Sadly, I closed the book and set it back on the shelf.
The magic was gone.
Comments
Post a Comment