OOP - It's Butterbeer time!

[Jim Ferer]

No: HPFGUIDX 67012

Jesta:"That's possible, but I don't think butterbeer *has* to be
alcoholic however mildly) just because it's got "beer" in its name.
Root beer, birch beer and ginger beer are all non-alcoholic.  Also, I
always thought it was non-alcoholic, but that house-elves just had
weird chemistry so that they got drunk on it."

Old-fashioned, real, homemade root beer and all the others do have
trace amounts of alcohol in them, because it's fermentation with yeast
that gives them their fizz.  The difference between, say, root beer
and beer beer is that you only leave  root beer to ferment for a few
hours, instead of days.

So, when Winky gets loaded on butterbeer, it tells us that the wizard
world makes it the old-fashioned way instead of just shooting CO2 into
it.  It fits with our image of the wizard world as a retro place in
many ways. Everything from the torches on the walls to the 19th
century speech patterns of the teachers (compare the way they talk to
the students - it's more than a generational thing) says so.