Paving the Whey

At Paoli’s Seven Acre Dairy Co., where there’s a will, there’s a whey. In this case, it was the team’s attempt to source and serve a whey-based spirit.

Chief restoration officer Nic Mink says he was interested in bringing spirits made with whey—a byproduct in the cheesemaking process after milk has curdled—to Seven Acre Dairy because of its strong historical connection. The nearby Sugar River used to be a disposal site for whey, and the building was a former cheese factory that is now a restaurant, bar, cafe, hotel and microdairy.

The catch was Mink didn’t want to add a distillery to Seven Acre Dairy, so he needed a partnership. It turns out that Wisconsin is home to one of the few distillers in North America who are creating whey-based spirits.

Six hours north in Bayfield is Copper Crow Distillery, the first Indigenous distiller in the United States. Co-owner Curt Basina, along with his wife Linda, started making whey-based spirits five years ago after craft beverage expert Rusty Figgins approached him at a beginner-level distillery class in Seattle.

“He grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, you’re from Wisconsin, you’re from the Dairy State. You need to look at doing something with dairy,’” Basina says. “He said ‘If you figure it out and make it work, you’ll have a solid brand for Copper Crow Distillery,’ so I accepted Rusty’s challenge.” That challenge has made Copper Crow known across the country for being one of the few places making whey-based spirits. Basina says whey-based spirits are popular in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia, but whey is an incredibly demanding base to use in making spirits so it has not expanded to the same extent in North America.

“Whey isn’t easy to deal with,” Basina says. “It has its own very unique properties. The lactose sugar does not like to ferment by conventional fermentation methods.”

For Mink, the fact Basina was local to Wisconsin and using whey in vodka and gin was fortuitous. The talks for the partnership started at the beginning of 2023 and led to a June release of Cheese Cave Dave's Whey Spirit, a neutral liquor that can be found only at Seven Acre Dairy.

To craft Cheese Cave Dave's and other whey spirits, Basina and his team at Copper Crow visit Burnett Dairy at least once a month to pick up 750 gallons of whey. They then ferment the whey and go through the distilling process. Once it is distilled, Copper Crow sends the spirit at a reasonable proof to Yahara Bay Distillers in Fitchburg.

Yahara Bay then bottles and labels it. From there, Yahara Bay sends it to Seven Acre Dairy where they sell Cheese Cave Dave's by the bottle and serve it in cocktails like This Is The Whey, their version of a piña colada, and The Cranberry Whey. The name comes from the tale of a bachelor named Cheese Cave Dave who supposedly lived in the basement of the original Paoli Cooperative Dairy Co. during Prohibition and decided to experiment with whey in spirits. While the story is fictional, Mink says there are some elements of truth, especially considering the quantity of whey that was produced when the original factory was fully functional.

In the cheesemaking process, 80–90% of milk becomes whey which leads to more than 130,000 gallons of waste each year. For Basina, using whey is a way Copper Crow can take what’s traditionally considered to be a waste product and turn it into a value-added product.

Basina spoke to other distillers about the positive effects of using whey as a raw material when he was the keynote speaker at the American Distilling Institute 2023 Sustainability Summit. Other distilleries, including a well-known Wisconsin distillery, are now coming to Copper Crow to learn about the process of distilling with whey since it is the only company doing this in the Midwest.

“Anytime that our community of local distillers can work together to develop new products and do other things, I think that’s fantastic,” Basina says. Mink says the sustainable benefits and drinkability of the whey was a big part of why they were interested in bringing this kind of spirit to southern Wisconsin.

“[Whey is] incredibly abundant and [using whey] could add a lot of value to the dairy supply chain,” Mink says.

Reception of the product at Seven Acre Dairy has been really great, Mink says—it’s selling as well as its Seven Acre Dairy farmhouse butter. He says many people are surprised at how delicious it is after initially seeing it as something unique and interesting.

Basina says the spirit “finishes almost sweet, it has a creamy, dairy-like mouthfeel to it.”

At Copper Crow, Basina crafts non-whey spirits as well and it’s truly up to a person’s palate whether or not they prefer the whey over the traditionally distilled alternative. At the distillery in Bayfield, he is working to produce amaretto and aquavit, while also experimenting with a coffee liquor and cocktail bitters—all using whey.

For the time being, Cheese Cave Dave's Whey Spirit is only available at Seven Acre Dairy.

“This partnership is unique because we have this really incredible resource in Curt and Linda who…have a tremendous amount of time invested in trying to figure this out,” Mink says.