Kerrygold makes the best Irish butter you can buy, but it comes at a price. Can an Aldi Kerrygold butter dupe save the day—and shave a few bucks off your grocery bill? We tasted Aldi Irish butter (aka Countryside Creamery Pure Irish Butter) to find out if it has what it takes to replace Kerrygold in your cart.
It can be fun to splurge. A little spa day. Seeing your favorite band in concert. Taking your mom out to a tea room and treating her to the priciest option on the menu because she’s your mom and she raised you and you can’t say no, even though your bank account wasn’t prepared to fund that many little crustless sandwiches. See! Just like I said, splurging is fun!. But who wants to splurge on butter? I mean, isn’t it just butter? Well, if that’s your attitude, then maybe you haven’t tried Kerrygold Pure Irish Butter.
Kerrygold isn’t just any butter. It is specifically Irish butter, which means it has a much higher butterfat content, giving it a creamier, more spreadable texture and a richer taste. Plus, it has a much richer yellow color due to the carotene-rich diet the cows are given, making for a slightly more nutritional butter.
This may seem like a bunch of mumbo jumbo from the Irish butter industry, but I promise I’m not an Irish butter plant: Kerrygold delivers all this and more. The taste difference between Kerrygold and other butters, especially American butters, is notable enough to create Kerrygold converts. Forums have been dedicated to people’s Kerrygold fandom. And it happens to be among the best tasting butter the Sporked team found in two separate butter taste tests. While its good qualities are well documented, there tends to be one thing that keeps people from making the switch from their run-of-the-mill sweet cream salted butter: the price.
Ever since 2019, there seems to have been a great discourse over the price of Kerrygold. As a result of high tariffs imposed on European imports that year, European brands, such as Kerrygold, were moved to raise the prices of their goods in the United States to accommodate the tax. As people noticed the rise in prices, they took to the internet not only to console each other, but to brainstorm potential, price-conscious alternatives to what became almost a luxury product.
And that, my friend, is when Aldi Irish butter, aka Countryside Creamery Irish Butter, entered the limelight.
Many people have taken to Aldi’s Countryside Creamery Irish Butter as a worthy Kerrygold dupe. People online have raved about the similar rich, salty butter flavor at half the cost. Some have even gone so far as to say the two are indistinguishable in flavor. We here at Sporked couldn’t help but feel a fluttery little feeling in our hearts at the sound of this. It was the feeling of…hope? Could there be a deliciously salty, creamy, fatty stick of butter for a fraction of the price of Kerrygold? Only time (and a taste test) will tell!
Is Aldi Irish butter a Kerrygold dupe or were we duped?
Aldi Irish butter is good. It’s not bad. Really, it’s fine—it’s nice. Oh god, I’ll just say it: It’s just not Kerrygold. When you take a bite of toast slathered in Kerrygold butter, it is a flavor journey. It’s unbelievably rich and creamy (perfect for spreading) and so flavorful you could almost eat it on its own—and I shamelessly took to doing that even after the taste test. Upon first bite, you start to sink into the savory, salty flavor and then somehow sink even deeper into this rich savory flavor that made us double-check that we got the original salted butter and not some sort of flavored butter. Hook me up to a lie-detector and I will tell you with 100% honesty that the flavor of Kerrygold butter is as addictive as really good chips. If I wasn’t working, I’d spend the day endlessly eating slices of buttered toast.
Like I said, Aldi Irish butter is good butter. It has the same yellow color. It is very creamy and spreadable, and it’s roughly as salty as Kerrygold. However, where Kerrygold flavor continues to evolve after the initial punch of saltiness hits you, Aldi just doesn’t. It’s salty, and then it’s just nothing. It ends on a strangely light note that couldn’t compete with the rich, mouth-filling flavor of Kerrygold. It’s not a bad butter, but it ain’t Kerrygold.
That said, Aldi Irish butter is cheaper if that’s your main motivation. An 8 oz slab of Aldi Countryside Creamery Irish Butter is only $3.59, while Kerry gold was between $4.79 and $6.99 in our area. So, yeah, at some stores, Kerrygold Irish Butter is only about a dollar more than Aldi Irish butter. Not a huge cost differential.
Sadly, I would not call Aldi Countryside Creamery Irish Butter a dupe for Kerrygold. I would say, though, that it is an affordable Irish butter option that is salty and creamy and generally tastes good. Will I be more likely to buy from Aldi when shopping for butter? On my budget, for sure. Will Aldi ever erase fond memories of Kerrygold from my dreams? Absolutely not.
