BRUTON, Minn. – When the crew at Redhead Creamery makes their artisan cheeses, they have booze in mind, and for good reason.
When award-winning cheeses like Mersey Cheddar and North Fork Whiskey Washed Munster are produced, only about 10 percent of the milk actually becomes cheese — the rest is a yellowish liquid called whey, which can be further broken down into protein (which can be fed to cows or sold commercially to humans) and sugars.
For the first time last week, the owners of Redhead Creamery have been turning that sugar into a distilled spirit called Araga, a clear liquor that’s milder than whiskey, rye or even vodka.
“It tastes like vodka, but it’s creamy. It’s soft,” says Lukas Sjostrom, who runs the creamery with his wife, Alice, and her parents, Jerry and Linda Jennissen.
While people around the world have been fermenting milk to produce alcohol for centuries, distilling whey to create specialty liquors is a more recent process, with several whey-based spirits hitting the market in the past decade, including Vodkow Vodka in Ontario, Wheyward Spirit in California, and Copper Crow in Bayfield, Wisconsin.
But the product is still very rare, with industry experts estimating that fewer than 20 distilleries worldwide produce whey-based spirits. Lukas Sjöström believes this scarcity is due to the inefficiency of using whey compared to grain in alcohol production, and also because many distilleries don’t have access to whey.
“You have to own a cheese factory and get the whey for free,” says Sjostrom, 37. “But we have the source, and we enjoy bringing dairy products to life.”
Araga and vodka made at the creamery are now sold in the venue’s tasting room, which recently began serving burgers, cheese platters and desserts as well. The cocktail menu features seven specialty drinks, many of which feature Araga, and all are garnished with Redhead’s artisanal cheeses.
Decades of love for dairy
The dairy owners’ obsession with dairy dates back decades: Jerry and Linda Jenissen met at a county calf show and, after marrying, moved to a farm just north of the current dairy site in 1979. That first winter, they happened upon the dairy site while cross-country skiing.
“It was an abandoned building. They were standing here just north of the dairy and they said, ‘This is a good place to raise a family. This is a good place to raise cows,'” Sjostrom said. “They thought it was so idyllic.”
The couple purchased the 40-acre farm in 1983 and have since restored it to its original 300 acres.
Lucas and Alice also met through dairy farming at a Junior Holstein Association convention and began dating at the University of Minnesota, where Lucas was majoring in animal science and Alice was majoring in dairy quality.
Alice, 38, also took part in the Milky Way Princess Kay contest and was nicknamed “Cheese Alice” by her friends.
“I had friends in high school who called me that,” she said with a laugh. “They always made fun of me because I was always making a big fuss about drinking your milk and eating your cheese.”
Alice had wanted to open an artisanal cheese business since she was in high school, and while living in Vermont for a few years, she worked at Grafton Village Cheese Co., which is what inspired her to bring Lucas into the company.
“Within a few weeks of starting, she was sending cheese to George H.W. Bush, John Travolta, and the CEO of Disney/Pixar at the time, and I thought, ‘Wow, people are buying this stuff,'” he says. “We had no friends, no kids, no family, so I spent every weekend going to cheese companies and breweries and started developing a business plan.”
They moved back to Minnesota in 2012, started a family, and soon after started their artisan cheese making business. Lucas also serves as the Executive Director of the Minnesota Milk Producers Association and is committed to supporting dairy farmers throughout the Midwest.
While a farm-based cheese company was Alice’s dream, adding alcohol was Lucas’ dream, after first reading about people turning whey into alcohol in 2011.
“I think at the time I was drinking Busch Light and didn’t even know what spirits were,” he said, “but I think we can make just as much money from the cheese division as we can from the spirits division.”
Over the past 10 years, Lucas has taken distillation classes and visited about 200 distilleries across the country.
“It’s a community similar to the cheese community,” he says. “You say, ‘I’m going to be a distiller,’ and they say, ‘Come back! Here’s all the stuff we don’t talk about on the tour.’ It was an incredible experience.”
The science behind it
So how does whey become araga? After the cheese-making process, the remaining whey is passed through filters to separate the proteins and sugars. Lactase is added to break down the sugars, and yeast is added to convert the glucose into alcohol.
At this stage of the process, the liquid is “Mountain Dew yellow” and tastes similar to cider beer. This liquid is then heated in the distillation process. The final product has an alcohol content of about 40%.
“This is by no means a new technique,” Lucas said, “but what they’ve figured out in the last 70 years is that the protein part is the valuable part. [of whey] All over the world, we’re doing the opposite: feeding protein to cows and saying we’re going to turn sugar into alcohol.”
Redhead Creamery, 31535 463rd Av., Brooten, Minn., redheadcreamery.com. The tasting room and cheese shop are open Thursday-Friday 11 a.m.-4 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Farm tours are available Friday-Saturday from 12:30 p.m.
