Blaand - a wine made from whey

[bernardsmith]

I know that this is the section for cheese making but I also know that many of the folk who go to this section are also wine or mead makers or beer brewers, and this topic is occasionally raised in those other parts of this forum more as a challenge than a routine activity but if you make hard cheese (cannot speak to using lemon juice or citric acid and the like for this purpose but I know that it is possible) and you are left with about 7 pints of whey from every gallon of milk you culture to make cheese you can make a quite delightful (if unusual today) wine or mead from that whey. This whey wine is known as blaand (think blonde not bland) in Scotland and in Scandanavia and it used to be made in crofts up until the beginning of the last Century. My understanding is that the recipe because absolutely home based were never published and are now "lost" but IMO blaand is really very simple to make.
1. Take your volume of sweet whey and heat it to kill the lactic bacteria. You don't want the bacteria to continue creating more lactic acid from any of the sugars available to them as the wine ferments
2. Add a quantity of sugar or honey to this whey. If sugar, I would add this while the whey is hot. If honey, I would wait until the whey drops to room temperature to preserve the flavor and aroma of the honey. The best batch I have made used about 1 lb of sugar to 7 pints of whey (about 50 points of fermentable sugar or a potential ABV of 6-7%)
3. Add tannin
4. Pitch your yeast. Your call what strain. You might experiment with different strains.
5. They say whey is full of nutrient for the yeast. It may be but I add nutrient.
6. Allow to ferment.
7. I like this as a semi sweet wine. You might like this brut dry.

For the one pound of sugar this is a great "way" to use this whey.

 

[passedpawn]

I'm going to give this a go. Sounds kinda nasty, but I've got a bunch of whey here, so...

 

[bernardsmith]

It actually isn't nasty if you enjoy whey. It doesn't taste like a regular wine and I honestly have no idea what the original recipes were like but I am assuming that if this was made to be drunk by crofters or "Vikings" then they would have preferred this to be a little more alcoholic than you might expect if one was simply fermenting the lactose. So I add fermentables and use the whey as a key flavor element. I also kill the lactic bacteria because I don't want the bacteria to transform the lactose in the whey to lactic acid making this more sour over time. I have also been experimenting with the use of added lactose to backsweeten this (about 4 oz of lactose to the 6 or 7 pints of whey I get from my cheese making).
For the record, I used some lemon juice to make "crowdie" and this makes for what I think of as an acidified whey. That batch has a brighter more tart flavor than the cultured sweet whey, which I slightly prefer but the answer to that may simply be that I need to add a little lemon juice to the sweet whey blaand.