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Butterbeer, as Heston Blumenthal points out in his Tudor Feast, is not just Harry Potter’s favourite tipple, it’s also a bona fide Tudor recipe made from ale, sugar, egg yolks, nutmeg and butter. If you’ve always thought that beer is good but could benefit from a few more calories, then this is the drink for you.

I heated some beer in a pan over a medium heat till it bubbled. Then I took it off the heat, added the egg, sugar and nutmeg mixture, put it back on a low heat and stirred for a couple of minutes until it went the colour of strong tea meets cloudy apple juice. By this point the kitchen smelled of mulled wine which was a more pleasant odour than you’d expect from a pot of warm eggy beer. I whisked in a little butter and the brew was complete.

Recipe for Butterbeer:

Ingredients:
500ml ale
Yolks from 2 medium eggs, whisked
60g sugar
Dash of nutmeg
15g unsalted butter

Instructions:

Pour the ale into a warm pan on a medium heat. When the beer begins to come to the boil take off the heat and add the whisked egg yolks, sugar and nutmeg.

Return the pot to a low heat (to stop the eggs from scrambling) and stir for 2 minutes. Take off the heat and whisk in the butter. Decant into your finest flagon and chug.

This clip shows the process of creating Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: An IMAX 3D Experience that features approximately 12 minutes of 3-D footage.

“The first step is masking out objects in the scene so that we can turn those objects 3-D,” says IMAX’s Eric Robinson as he shows off the software. “The next step is, re-create the scene in 3-D so that we can generate depth information from that. Our proprietary render system generates a new image, which is offset from the original.”

Seems like a lot of work when they could’ve just filmed it with 3D cameras in the first place, but whatever.