The Whey Forward — The Beverage Makers Innovating to Solve a Major Food Waste Issue

About 1.8 billion pounds of dairy milk is used to make yogurt every year in New York State, the country’s leading yogurt producer. During the yogurt-making process, the majority of the liquid bulk of milk—a substance called whey—is removed. For each gallon of Greek yogurt produced (the most popular yogurt style in both New York and the country), three to four gallons of whey waste are left behind. And most of it goes down the drain into wastewater treatment facilities, or is used as an agricultural fertilizer.

Now, a group of innovators is rethinking whey’s possibilities, and trying to change the narrative around the whey waste stream by reclaiming the by-product, reducing environmental impact, and pioneering a new sector of beverage alcohol.

Sam Alcaine at Norwhey Brewing in New York is one of them. Alcaine is a professor at Cornell University, working in the Fermentation Lab at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Science. He earned his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts studying bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria and can be engineered to detect bacteria cells—but found his professional specialty in fermentation. After working at the Miller Brewing Company in new product development and co-founding Denver’s Doc Luces Brewery with Judd Belstock, Alcaine has spent the last several years figuring out how to ferment things that most people would never think to. Like whey.

Whey waste is a major ecological and logistical problem, and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) realized a few years back that the academic and private sectors might be able to find solutions if given some funding. It approached Cornell, and the challenge piqued Alcaine’s curiosity.

“You do the math and you end up with over a billion pounds of whey being produced in New York every year,” he says. “There is a lot of lactose floating out there, and I wanted to find out how we could ferment that in new and novel ways.”

His research was successful, and Alcaine eventually realized there was a path forward for solving the whey problem beyond the walls of his laboratory. In April 2022, Alcaine opened the doors of Norwhey Brewing, a beverage alcohol company producing a line of refreshing, sessionable seltzers flavored with fruit and spices. These 4% ABV drinks come in flavors like Solar Citrus and Mountain Berry, and they’re loaded with minerals derived from their yogurt whey base. For now, these whey seltzers are using only a pittance of the total whey produced in the state, but Alcaine and others hope this new use for the dairy by-product will see broader adoption and further innovation.

“People don’t realize how much whey is generated,” says Sally Rowland, an engineer in the organics reduction and recycling group at the DEC who first reached out to Cornell. “Chobani alone produces 50 truckloads every day. We felt Cornell could be very innovative with this if they had financial support. The food science research community has come a long way.”

Across the country in Oregon, Emily Darchuk of Wheyward Spirits put her own background in research to work on the whey waste issue. With a master’s degree in food science, Darchuk worked as a craft developer for a food and beverage company before founding Wheyward, focusing on natural foods and dairy products. It was there she became aware of the whey waste problem.

“For me, it involved stepping back and seeing that a lot of the innovation around waste issues was going away from the big companies and being very entrepreneurial instead,” she says. “Small companies could actually solve problems and take risks the bigger companies couldn’t. That put the whey waste problem in a whole new light. Here’s an opportunity to solve the kind of problem I’ve always wanted to, and it just landed on my desk.”

Darchuk began doing her own experiments with fermenting whey, and eventually settled on making a distilled-whey-based spirit similar to vodka, but with a fuller mouthfeel and a subtle spice character. She sees the result as not only innovating within the food waste sphere, but also injecting new life into the often tradition-bound spirits industry.

“Here’s something that’s highly perishable that can be given a long shelf life, and a beverage category that’s stuck in the 1920s and is ripe for a lot of the ethos that I saw in the natural food world,” she observes. “I decided to focus on flavor and show that I’m making a natural evolution in agricultural-based spirits.”

WHEY BACK IN TIME

What Alcaine, Darchuk, and others are doing is relatively new within modern beverage alcohol, but the idea of consuming and in some cases fermenting whey is anything but.

When Melissa Martinelli got the idea to create a whey-based soft drink called Superfrau using reclaimed whey from the yogurt industry, she wasn’t inventing a new concept. Her husband and business partner, Michael Hagauer, is from Austria, where flavored whey is a popular beverage for all ages. 

“The cheesemakers use whey from cheese and add juice to it,” she explains. “My husband would talk about it all the time and I finally tried it and was blown away. We liked to add sparkling water to it.”

When the pair started investigating what folks in the U.S. do with whey, the answers were dissatisfying. She found out most of the waste stream ends up being spread on fields (which can cause issues because of its relatively high acidity) or dumped into waste water (a problem because of whey’s high biological and chemical oxygen demands), making the dairy industry a major source of food waste. Martinelli’s background is as an immigration lawyer, and she saw reclamation of whey waste as addressing the same needs that originally led her to that profession.

“One of the biggest contributors to forced migration is climate change, and one of the main causes of climate change is food waste, so for me it made sense,” she says.

Regular consumption of whey dates back millennia, when reclamation of food by-products was more about frugality than environmental responsibility. Alcaine has tracked down printed sources describing the use of whey in Iceland left over from making skyr—Icelandic yogurt—in past centuries. The whey was put into barrels and aged, undergoing fermentation, and would then be consumed. It was often described as an alcoholic beverage, but records are unclear on whether the ethanol was a product of fermentation or was added after the fact. He also found records in Sweden of citizens mixing milk with wheat beer during the World Wars to make both products stretch further.

“Hippocrates was prescribing [whey beverages] to patients 2,400 years ago,” says Martinelli. “It’s really not that innovative. We’re bringing back an old tradition that was lost in industrialization.”

While modern consumers are increasingly conscious of food waste concerns, the idea of reclaiming and consuming a dairy “waste” product can still be a tough sell. Misconceptions about what a whey-based beverage will taste like have led these beverage-makers to get creative with how they handle their marketing. 

Omid McDonald at Dairy Distillery in Almonte, Ontario, produces a distilled dairy spirit called Vodkow. The company made a strategic choice when it launched, to carefully frame what exactly it was fermenting.

“At the beginning of the project, we were nervous to use the phrase ‘waste stream,’” he explains. “So we used the name ‘unused milk sugar.’ We thought people might say, ‘Oh, this is gross, rotten milk,’ even though the milk [by-product] we receive is pasteurized and cold and you could drink it fresh.” 

That softening of language made a smaller initial ask of the consumer, and allowed people to approach the idea of trying Vodkow from the standpoint of environmental and economic innovation. In turn, McDonald saw more curiosity than reservation from first-timers, giving them time to get over the connotations of using “waste” and “dairy” in the same sentence.

“The way you coach it is important,” agrees Alcaine. “I tend not to use the word ‘waste.’ I talk about it instead as a by-product. The big piece with something like this is getting over not just the idea of waste, but whey itself. People don’t know what that word means or that it can be light and refreshing.” 

All of these producers have found that leaning into the environmental benefits has yielded dividends. “When we opened, people would say, ‘Hold on here, you say you’re turning waste into something useful? That’s really cool,’” says McDonald. 

Martinelli is utilizing that same angle to drive Superfrau’s market strategy. “I think consumers that skew a little younger—our target market—really do care about sustainability and their individual impact on the environment,” she says. “Superfrau gives them an opportunity to do something with their everyday consumption habits that makes a difference.”

Larry Walker is the president of the New York Dairy Promotion Advisory Board, which is tasked with promoting the interests of the state’s dairy farmers and processors to consumers. The board provided funding to Alcaine in the early days of his research. Walker’s interest in finding innovative ways to improve the dairy industry goes beyond his role—he’s a third-generation dairy farmer himself, managing a herd of 2,300 cows. He too sees a younger consumer base as being key to the success of whey-based beverages.

“My kids are in their early twenties, and they enjoy the seltzers and that type of stuff,” he says. “I think it’s going to be that generation, the kids, that finds this appealing. If [Alcaine] can get a foothold in that generation, that’s where it will take off for him.”

WHERE THERE’S A WILL, THERE’S A WHEY

While there are veritable oceans of whey available for beverage-makers to reclaim, there’s a basic problem that has made whey-based spirits a novel corner of the market: Whey isn’t all that easy to ferment.

The primary sugar in cow’s milk is lactose, and lactose is unfermentable by yeasts in the Saccharomyces genus, by which nearly all beer, wine, and spirits are fermented. There’s a ton of available sugar in whey and other dairy by-products, but it’s inaccessible through typical fermentation pathways. Makers have to get creative. 

During the energy crisis of the 1970s, whey was looked at as a possible base for producing biofuels, and the Kluyveromyces yeast genus was found at the time to efficiently convert milk sugar into ethanol by producing its own lactase enzyme to break down the lactose into simpler sugars. The concept didn’t get much traction at the time, but it inspired Alcaine to revisit this unique yeast in his lab. 

“We’ve done a little work with Kluyveromyces, but sometimes it gives off some medicinal, chemical off-notes,” he explains. “In distilling, people definitely use it because you don’t get those volatiles carrying over to the finished product. But I haven’t seen anyone use it for a straight alcoholic beverage.”

Kluyveromyces marxianus is McDonald’s tool of choice at Vodkow. He’s producing his spirits from milk permeate, a dairy by-product left over from the production of ultra-filtered milk. Nearly all proteins and fats have been removed from the permeate, leaving behind water and lactose. By working with the University of Ottawa, and with the help of federal and provincial research money, McDonald settled on this yeast to produce the base for his spirits. 

Alcaine didn’t want to employ distillation when making his Norwhey line, though, so he needed a method of fermentation that wouldn’t produce off-putting flavors. He next explored an intriguing option familiar to brewers and fans of mixed-fermentation beers. “I came across some interesting old research that Brettanomyces claussenii could utilize lactose,” he says. “It wasn’t as efficient as Kluyveromyces, but it could do it.”

Brettanomyces claussenii, commonly referred to as Brett C, is a yeast species found in many mixed-fermentation and spontaneously fermented beers, and its popularity has led to its ready availability as a pure culture from yeast banks. While it produces the signature funkiness that has become synonymous with Brett, it can also yield surprising fruit flavors, like pineapple or cherry pie. Alcaine is puzzled as to why this specific species of Brettanomyces can break down lactose when others, like Brettanomyces bruxellensis, cannot, especially since it is not naturally found in dairy products. 

“We still don’t know why it can use lactose, but we’ve been able to isolate the gene that allows it to, cloned it out, and put it into other yeasts to show that it will give them the ability to ferment lactose as well,” he explains. “We’ve made a Saccharomyces strain that can use lactose now.”

Brett C was an intriguing option for Alcaine, not only because of the unique flavors it could create, but because of its wide availability. His research occurred as Brett beers were at the peak of their popularity.

“There were yeast houses selling Brett C cultures super cheap,” he recalls. “It is really hard to find Kluyveromyces cultures to play with, but we had this Brett culture that would ferment lactose and add new flavors, and we thought that could be something interesting.”

B. claussenii presented some exciting possibilities, but Alcaine quickly ran into a roadblock. While this yeast is highly desirable in certain beers, it’s a spoilage organism for standard-fermentation beers. When it came time to open Norwhey, he wanted to partner with an existing brewery to handle production while he led research and development on a small pilot brewery. And no one wanted to be messing with Brett in their breweries.

“We had to take a step back,” he explains. “There’s the research side, which I think is super cool, and then there’s what co-make facilities are willing to bring into their plants. A lot are hesitant to bring Brett into their main production facility.”

For scaling, he ultimately settled on the simplest available option: adding a lactase enzyme to break down the lactose into the component sugars glucose and galactose, and then fermenting with a wine strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The strain can handle low nutrient levels and has a neutral flavor profile. It’s the least exciting of his options, but also the easiest. Additionally, the enzyme completely converts the lactose into fermentable sugar, allowing the yeast to fully attenuate from its starting gravity of about 1.024 down to 1.002. They supplement the lactose with a bit of added sugar to hit an ABV of 4%. 

While enzymes appear to be the path forward for scaled production, Alcaine is still excited about the possibilities B. claussenii presents.

“I’m still really interested in getting Brett into a facility and really leveraging the Cornell research,” he says. “When we do an oxygenated fermentation, we can also drive acetic acid production with Brett and make kombucha-like products. You can have a facility where just by changing the oxygenation you can decide what type of product you’re making.”

For the time being, Norwhey is focused on what it calls “Nordic seltzers,” which it produces at the Meier’s Creek Brewing Company facility near Syracuse. The line consists of three flavors, all using natural ingredients: Mountain Berry, Solar Citrus, and Glacial Ginger. While the presence of alcohol prevents Alcaine from making specific health claims, he does explain that whey is loaded with naturally occurring minerals that survive the fermentation process. A can of Norwhey contains about 30% of the average daily allowance of calcium, and about 10% each of potassium, zinc, magnesium, and phosphorus. 

“That’s just the natural level of the whey,” he explains. “We don’t add anything. We’re promoting Norwhey as an active lifestyle brand and reaching out to running and biking clubs and gyms.” 

THE ONLY WHEY TO GO

Because fermenting whey is a new concept in the modern beverage alcohol world, the emergence of companies like Norwhey has raised questions as to how to even classify these drinks. When it comes to Norwhey’s seltzers, this varies based on which governing body you ask. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) considers it wine, while the state of New York considers it beer. For the time being, Norwhey is distributing only within New York, so licensing is fairly simple, but things will become more complicated if and when Alcaine decides to expand his distribution footprint.

On the distillation side, whey-based spirits are typically unaged, and get grouped most commonly with vodka. In the case of McDonald’s Dairy Distillery, which leaned into that similarity by naming its product Vodkow Vodka, getting the right to do that required government lobbying to change the law in Canada.

“The [Canadian] federal government’s definition of vodka when we started out was that it had to be made from grain or potato,” McDonald says. “I thought that was odd, because the U.S. had no such restriction and neither did Europe. About 12 years ago, Europe went through what it called the Vodka Wars, where Eastern Europeans fought with Western Europeans about the definition of vodka, because the Eastern Europeans didn’t want things like sugar to be used. They came to a regulation that as long as you list the source of the sugar, you can call it vodka. I petitioned the government here to change the definition, and I was amazed that after a year they changed it.”

While the U.S. didn’t have a law specifying the fermentable base of vodka, Darchuk narrowly dodged a different regulatory challenge at Wheyward Spirits with her vodka-adjacent product. About a year after Canada updated its vodka laws, the U.S. made a quiet but game-changing adjustment to its own: It removed the requirement that vodka be neutral in character. Whey-based spirits typically aren’t, by design. While legally Darchuk could consider her spirit vodka, she still doesn’t like the neutral connotation of that category, and instead celebrates her product’s unique character.

“We’re taking an approach more akin to tequila, making our [distilling cuts] a little lower in order to keep that flavor in,” she explains. “That’s what makes us a specialty spirit versus a vodka or gin. It has really lovely notes of oaky vanilla, and you get a little bit of warm spice, a little bit of peppercorn. At the end it’s just really smooth. I don’t want to call it creamy, because you’ll think that’s the dairy note, but it has a velvety finish to it. Some people get a little pear, a little Champagne, or a little chardonnay butteriness. Someone described it as being like if vodka and sake had a baby.”

Whatever you want to call it, the response has been extremely positive. Wheyward Spirit has won Double Gold at the New York World Wine & Spirits Competition, and Gold at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, both in the clear spirits categories against non-whey-based spirits of other varieties. Both Darchuk and McDonald find the distinctiveness of their spirits to be assets behind the bar.

“The oaky vanilla notes help us play with some fun bitters and amaros like an aged spirit would, and those lactones help us play where a rum would,” explains Darchuk. She goes on to say Wheyward can be used like a vodka, and the sweetness of a traditional cocktail recipe can be reduced by about 30% because of the perceived sweetness of the spirit.

“It’s fun being agnostic like this, because you don’t have to check certain boxes,” she says. “You don’t have to have a ton of liquors behind the bar this way. You can focus on flavor and having the other ingredients in your cocktail come together to tell a really cool story, which I think is more fun anyway.”

McDonald agrees, and says the slightly creamy texture helps set Vodkow apart from other vodkas.

“There’s something about the structure that is different,” he says. “It works really well in a Moscow Mule. The slightly sweeter taste profile makes it special.”

THE WHEY LESS TRAVELED

Whey-based spirits are so new, no sales figures exist to break out their growth from other categories. The sources interviewed for this story are all seeing significant sales growth for their brands and enthusiasm from consumers, but collectively still represent a tiny corner of the beverage market, and are only able to reclaim a small portion of the dairy waste stream. Dairy Distillery takes in about 4,500 gallons of milk permeate per week, which sounds like a lot until you hear that the dairy processor from which that permeate is sourced produces over 50,000 gallons of it every day.

At Superfrau, Martinelli thinks the motivation for greater whey utilization by beverage companies will be an economic decision at the industrial level rather than a purely consumer-driven trend. Finding creative uses for whey and other dairy by-products is a win for every level of the dairy production chain.

“A lot of this is about shifting mentalities,” she explains. “I never imagined it would be so hard to divert whey from the waste stream. We really want yogurt and cheese makers to see liquid whey as a really valuable co-product rather than a by-product. We’re laying the groundwork so this becomes something like what happened with whey protein powder. For a lot of businesses, they make the cheese because the protein powder is so valuable. The by-product of protein powder has become cheese rather than the other way around. That could be the case for all yogurt and cheese manufacturers. Folks are starting to see the value proposition. We’re paying to haul off their waste.”

The use of dairy waste has other ecological benefits that could sustain its growth as well. Darchuk points out that while the tequila category is exploding, the segment is resource-constrained at a certain point because of the time and land required for growing agave. There’s functionally no limit, however, to the availability of dairy fermentables, and Alcaine is optimistic about the growth that can fuel.

“There’s a lot of room for growth in this category as long as the consumers show interest,” he says. “In five to 10 years, if we were to take all the whey from one of the large yogurt producers in New York, we could make a company around the size of Brooklyn Brewery’s volume at 200-300,000 barrels annually, which is not unreasonable. If we were to use all the whey in the state, we’d be the size of Sam Adams.”

That growth would make more money for dairy processors, which would in turn mean bigger checks for dairy farmers who have seen milk consumption drop of late due to a decrease in breakfast cereal consumption and the replacement of milk by other packaged beverages. Because whey is a waste product, processors have to pay to dispose of it. That cost comes out of the checks they write to the dairy farmers. If they’re making money on that waste, more money makes it back to the farm. Walker at the Dairy Promotion Board sees that as a boost to the dairy industry, but he’s trying to be realistic about how much impact companies like Norwhey Brewing can have. Despite the early success of these producers, there’s still a question of how much consumer adoption will allow for scalability.

“As a beverage industry, I don’t know how much it would take out of the available production,” says Walker. “I know there’s plenty of whey out there. Will it help the dairy farmers? Yes. Will it make a huge impact on the industry? I don’t know yet.”

Martinelli thinks it’s a matter of getting the industry to recognize the value inherent in reclaiming a waste product. She’s seen nothing but enthusiasm from consumers, and has adopted an “If you brew it, they will come” attitude.

“We have to convince people that there is a market for this, and we’re creating a market for it,” she explains. “We can make a lot of Superfrau. Milk really does need to innovate, and this is a lifeline.”

Words by David Nilsen
Illustrations by David Alvarado