Sunday Brunch: The New
Brew in Town Tickles the Tastebuds
14 October 2012
Residents, visitors, and guests
of Orlando were treated to quite a surprise this
past weekend when a new brew came to town at
Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Lucky guests of the
kingdom and internet savvy Disney park fans got
the chance to explore New Fantasyland in a soft
opening preview. For Disney foodies like you and
I, part of this preview was the highly
anticipated return of
Maurice’s Amazing Popping Machine and
Gaston’s Tavern, a small food and beverage
location like Sunshine Tree Terrace and the
Lunching Pad. Complete with such details as
decorative taxidermy, interior damage from bar
fights, and bulky “wooden” tables and chairs,
the tavern is a convincing recreation of the
antler decorated pub devoted to Gaston seen in
the rousing musical number “Gaston” of Beauty
and the Beast.

Being a tavern,
the food and beverage stand serves tavern-like
food such as roasted pork shank (the Turkey
leg’s new will-it-or-won’t-it-be-popular cousin)
and fresh, warm cinnamon buns, the same served
at
Main Street Bakery. A highly trustworthy
source states Gaston’s Tavern will take over the
serving and production of the popular Magic
Kingdom snack. The Main Street Bakery will be
closing its store and oven doors when it goes
down for rehab next year to make way for the
park’s Starbucks. With no other obvious food
location in the park, Gaston’s Tavern is the
most sensible location to transfer a Magic
Kingdom exclusive.

The design of the menu makes it seem as though
the meat source, Pork, may be interchangeable in
the future
The tavern like food is only a
background feature in the menu at Gaston’s. The
main attraction is the already marketed LeFou’s
Brew, advertised and described as a “no-sugar
added frozen apple juice beverage with a hint of
toasted marshmallow, topped with an all-natural
passion fruit-mango foam.” I got a chance to try
a small sample of the brew while training for my
new job. The toasted marshmallow was certainly a
hint as I could barely find it, but it was there
nonetheless. The fruit foam was nice, simply
something different, nothing outside, but a
welcome new flavor combination with the apple
juice. While not normally a big fan of apple
juice, I found it to be quite refreshing and
delicious. For me, regular apple juice is rather
acidic and astringent for my tastes. LeFou’s
frozen version reduces the strength of the
juice, making it more palatable for those who
aren’t keen on apple juice. This is so because
temperature of food plays a big role in your
sense of taste. If food items are significantly
hotter or colder than the average temperature of
your mouth, less flavor is perceived because
your tastebuds are shocked by the temperature
change. This is particularly true for cold
foods, such as ice cream. Ice cream is
essentially flavored milk that has been churned
and chilled. If one churns and chills milk, it
wouldn’t taste like anything, hence the addition
of vanilla, chocolate, etc. Anyhow, for LeFou’s
brew, the same principle holds true, allowing me
to enjoy the apple juice without cringing.
Now one cannot talk about
LeFou’s brew – or New Fantasyland for that
matter – without discussing its obvious
competition: Butterbeer, a non-alcoholic
butterscotch flavored fizzy beverage with a
creamy foam found over at the Wizarding World of
Harry Potter at Universal’s Islands of
Adventures. When discussing LeFou’s brew with
friends, the first instinct was to compare it to
butterbeer. For those of you who are unaware,
butterbeer is the beverage Harry Potter and his
friends drink in local wizard pubs. With the
creation of the theme park version of this
popular book’s universe, this beverage was a
must needed atmospheric and storytelling item as
well as an expected merchandising opportunity.
While I did enjoy having the drink of Harry and
his friends I’ve read and wondered about for
years, I found it to be much too sweet and I
usually am not able to finish it. On the bright
side, the park also serves a frozen version
which I prefer much more like the already frozen
LeFou’s brew. My guess is that the regular
butterbeer is the base used to make the frozen
version, so it is already overly sweet and
flavored.

Guests can debate endlessly
whether this is true or not, but in my opinion,
New Fantasyland is the obvious response to
Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
Besides the makeover of Mickey’s Birthdayland
into its subsequent re-naming and re-theming,
Magic Kingdom has not had a major park addition
since the 1992 opening of Splash Mountain, so
the timing of the opening of New Fantasyland is
rather suspicious. LeFou’s Brew goes hand in
hand with this theory, as its basic elements are
not-so-coincidentally similar to butterbeer: a
frozen beverage with a foamy topping served in a
souvenir cup.
It can be argued
that LeFou’s Brew is a necessary product as it
is needed for the storytelling element of
Gaston’s tavern. Though the neighboring Be Our
Guest restaurant is serving beer and wine,
Disney cannot serve beer, ale, or other
alcoholic brews at Gaston’s, where it could be
easily accessed and intake is less easily
controlled. At the same time, a food and
beverage location themed as a tavern cannot
serve the usual theme park beverages. So the
Imagineers and Food and Beverage team came up
with LeFou’s Brew, a kid-friendly beverage that
not only plays a story element for the location,
but also conveniently can be marketed like the
competition’s souvenir beverage. It seems like
Disney tried to do butterbeer better by making
it healthy and more exotic by using apple juice
and mango. They also took it a step further by
offering two types of souvenir cups: a
Gaston/Beast decorated plastic tankard or a
Belle decorated plastic goblet. Oddly enough,
LeFou does not appear on his own brew. I guess
Gaston felt that simply letting him use his name
was more than generous.

Still, with all theories and
arguments aside, LeFou’s Brew is a delicious and
refreshing beverage as well as a fun souvenir
(you can buy just the beverage though for a much
lower cost). While I did enjoy my sample, my
opinion may change after I have a full serving
and also get my souvenir mug. For whatever
reason how and this new park beverage came to
be, I think the best part though is it is a
great answer to the question of what will be
served in Gaston’s Tavern and I’d have to say
Magic Kingdom has an awesome new signature food
item. Will it be the next Dole Whip? Will it be
as beloved and sought after as the Main Street
Bakery cinnamon roll? The answer will come when
this tale becomes as old as time.