Blaand

Blaand is fermented whey. It sounds like the most disgusting fermented beverage known to man. So let's make it. To get whey, I need to make cheese. So we will be making cheese today. Then making blaand. This post is more for me to gather my thoughts and come up with a procedure than anything.

Blaand is an old Viking drink from the days of yore. There's a reason it's not too popular anymore. It probably tastes like shit. And any normal man would avoid such hellish creations. But I am not your normal man. Lactose is the sugar in milk and brewers yeast can't digest it. So it will be a trick to break it down into something fermentable. We will use lactaid which is just the lactase enzyme for people to eat who are lactose intolerant.

How you may ask did our Viking brothers achieve fermentation then? Well I have done some homework and have some theories. One is they may have used a SCOBY which stands for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. The bacteria would carry the lactase enzyme to break down the lactose and then the yeast could ferment from that. It would taste fucking gross. Another is that there is an enzyme in the stomach of calves to break down the lactose which makes sense. They used cow stomachs as canteens to store liquids since it would be water proof. They may have figured out that if you store the milk in a calve's stomach for a few days it would then be fermentable. Lastly, there is a yeast that can metabolize lactose into ethanol. It lives in dairy (shocker!). So if you just put whey in a fermenter and wait long enough, I guess you can get drunk off of it. But, also all the bacteria that make lactic acid would be there too. You know, the stuff that makes yogurt and such. So it seems to me it would turn into this putrid acidic nasty liquid that I guess would get you drunk. If you didn't puke it up. Anyhow, we will use some modern science and get something that is safe. And probably tastes bad. And hopefully will get you drunk.

Which brings me to another point. Blaand apparently was like a wine. There's not enough sugar in milk to make wine. So they must have spiked it with something sweet. Probably honey since they were already familiar with mead. We will make two batches. One with just whey and one with whey and honey. Honestly, they probably added the honey so they wouldn't puke when trying to swallow it.

Step 1: Make cheese
Ingredients - 2 gallons of milk. Lemon juice
Equipment - 2 big ass pots. Cheese cloth. Strainer.
Procedure:
1. Put 2 gallons of milk in the first big ass pot. Bring it up to 175F. Stir often to keep from skin forming on top and scorching on the bottom.
2. Remove from heat and add lemon juice. I've seen 1/2 cup per gallon. So for 2 gallons I guess would be a cup. I also see folks say to just add little bits at a time. The curds and the whey should separate.
3. Let it to sit and finish the separation process for 15mins.
4. Get a small muslin bag and put it in a strainer and scoop out some of the curds. Squeeze out as much of the whey as we can. Put it to the side. This will become cheese and we will eat it as a family later.
5. The rest of the curds are unfortunately a by-product for us today. Which is ironic since most of the time when making cheese the whey is the by-product that gets tossed. Line the big cheese cloth over the second pot and pour the contents of the first pot over the cheese cloth. The cloth should catch the curds and the whey should filter out into the second pot.
6. Grab a small sample of whey at this point. We will want it for sampling.

Step 2: Make Blaand
Ingredients - Whey, honey, yeast
Equipment - Fermenters, air locks, flask to rehydrate, pot to boil re-hydrate water, funnel, chuck of styrofoam for temp control.
Procedure:
1. Get the whey to around 100F. Hopefully by now it has cooled down. Add the lactaid to convert the lactose in the whey to fermentable sugars for the yeast. 2 gallons of milk is about 8000g. I'm guessing after we remove the curds we will have 5000ish grams of whey. Wikipedia claims every 100g of whey has 5g of lactose.  So 2 gallons has 250g of lactose. So how much lactase do I need? Should be a simple question to answer. Nope. I spent 20mins on this and couldn't get a straight answer. My pills have 9000 FCC Lactase units. Sounds made up. Whatever. It says you can take two. I did read you can't really hurt yourself and take too many. I assume that means within reason. Like don't do the whole box every day. So I'm going to just take a SWAG here and go with 4 tablets for my 2 gallons of whey. We may not convert all the sugar but we will convert some. The instructions say to take more pills after 30 or so minutes so I take that to mean that they denature after that time (assume around 100F cause that's what people are). So we will wait 30mins for the proteins to do their thing. Take a sample and compare to the one we took before conversion and pray that science works.
2. Wait for enzymes to work. Take this time to boil up and cool some water for re-hydrating yeast.
3. Boil whey to kill germs. 15 mins should be fine.
4. Cool whey. Try to get it to 70F. Take this time to re-hydrate the yeast.
5. Transfer whey to two separate 1 gallon fermenters.
6. Add honey to one fermenter. I got 1.5 pounds. That should make a dry mead. 3 pounds per gallon is typically what you want for sweet meads.
7. Add yeast. I got 71B-1122 wine yeast from Cellar Science. Packet claims 1 gram per gallon. Ok. I'll use 1 gram in the honey fermeter and half a gram in the other. I have no idea the nutritional value of whey for yeasts, so I'll add 0.5g of DAP and 1g of FermaidK in each.
8. Move to fermenter. Add styrofoam chunk to fermenter for better temp control.
9. Ferment at 70F.


2:34pm - I needed 2 pots to warm up the milk. It seems 1/2 cup of lemon juice per gallons is perfect. They are sitting now. Minor screw up. I didn't stir one of the pots enough and now there is chunks of burnt milk in there. No problem. We will make cheese for the family from the other pot.

3:25pm - Forgot about ice. I called Ellie and she will bring some later. It looks like we yielded about 1.5 gallons of whey. I'm sure I spilled some along the way. Anyhow I've added the lactaid. So we will wait about 30mins to let it do it't thing. I might stretch it to 40mins. I cooled the whey in the sink and it got down to 95ish. So it may take a little more time to convert. Also they should denature slower. I guess I got time to make fish.

4:06 - The whey has converted to sugar. I'm not saying it all did. But some did. I can taste sugar. So can Ellie. I actually got a little gun shy adding the lactase. I was about to put it in and hesitated for just a second. And then I said out loud "science" and I put it in. I'm pretty proud I used my knowledge of biology and got this to work. Also, I eyeballed the DAP and FermaidK. I just couldn't figure out a sanitary way to get it measured and poured into the fermenters.

4:40 - There are definitely proteins in whey. That shit boiled over while I was taking care of the fish and made a mess everywhere.

5:52 - OG of plain whey measured 1.030. With honey 1.103. The whey plus honey tasted really good.

6:09 - All done. I asked E to get me a 7 pound bag of ice and I screwed that up. We ended up with I'm guessing 1.6667 gallons of whey. It's takes a lot to cool all that down. The whey has a very parmesan taste and smell to it as does the cheese. I made a small cheese wheel and sliced some off for E and Junny. I put a little salt on it and served it up. They seemed to really like it. It really tastes like a cross between the white string cheese and parmesan cheese. Another thing I didn't count on was that the whey was cooled to about 68F but then I put in warm honey. It was warm because it flows out of the container better. That warmed up the whey/honey blend. So it's going to take a bit for the fridge to cool it down. But since it's only 1 gallon it should happen quick.