The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.
If you haven’t already heard, a prequel to the Harry Potter film series – “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” – is coming out in November. And a coffee shop in Texas is reveling in the wizarding world by serving up a special drink.
Rob Brandenburg, owner of Peggy’s Coffee House in Temple, confirms that it’s the actual butterbeer beverage. He first tried the sweet concoction at Universal Studios’ Harry Potter theme park in Florida.
He told us how he went about recreating the famed brew – well, kind of.
“It’s something that we don’t want to give away too much. It’s very sweet, and it’s just refreshing,” he says. “It’s almost – when you think of butterbeer, you don’t know what to expect, but when you sip ours we’ve had so many people say, wow this is exactly what I think it would taste like. It’s creamy, it’s frothy, it’s got a nice texture. It’s very sweet, there’s a vanilla bean cream on top and everything really just works together very well to make a nice pallet to your taste buds.”
Brandenburg says he’s a Harry Potter fan himself.
“I was able to read the books and just was immersed in that whole atmosphere, that universe J.K. Rowling created,” he says. “And being able to step foot into Universal Studios and see what they’ve done – it’s like stepping into the movie and so we just wanted to bring a little piece of that back and be able to offer that to our customers and be able to have fun and experience that small part of that we could share with them.”
Peggy’s Coffee House is planning to sell butterbeer until “Fantastic Beasts” finishes its theatrical run. Plus, they’re located right next to a movie theater in Temple – and you can bring drinks into the theater.
As you probably know, early voting kicked off statewide on Monday. But in Denton County, some early birds didn’t get the worm. Instead, some voters encountered problems with voting machines. One of them was Trophy Club resident Bonnie Moore.
She told KERA in North Texas she was turned away from a polling place when she went to vote before 9:00 a.m.
“It was very frustrating – there were lots of people, and there were older people who were struggling to even get out of the car much less to get turn around and back in,” she said. “And there was just no explanation. It wasn’t like, ‘Thank you for voting,’ or, ‘here’s a paper ballot,’ or ‘here’s anything,’ – it was just, ‘sorry the machines aren’t working.'”
The machines weren’t working because they were programmed for precinct-specific Election Day ballots – not early voting. Denton County officials brought in new equipment and will be looking into how this happened.
U.S. News & World Report released its list of the best global universities today – and two Texas schools cracked the top 100.
The University of Texas at Austin nabbed the 30 slot, while Rice University landed at 61.
Harvard got number one.
