Update Re: the way to whey?

Earlier this week I went back to HFS and bought a quart container of what appeared to be the only decent brand of yogurt they had at the time. I think I may have been there at a bad time as it seemed the yogurt section of the cooler was way low on stock...nearly depleted. The product I got is a goat's milk product by a company named Redwood Mills. After the fact I am still uncertain of the exact grade of this product with respect to the ideal desired. If I had to guess I would say this product is probably towards the high end of the middle of the road IE> not the worst, not the best, somewhere in between. This opinion based largely on the info from the product label, which among other facts indicates " humane treatment of animals ". To me this sounds nice but it also looks like a round about way of simply stating whether or not the goats were free-ranging or not. The skeptic in me imagines that some people / corporations have the belief that they have a humane way of treating beasts of burden that they keep in a cage during the productive period of their lives. The label also indicates it is pastuerized, which I consider a major strike against the ideal sought in this situation. I also take this ( Pasteur's heating process ) happened when the milk was still in the milk stage, not after it had become yogurt stage, but this does make me wonder ; do they cook the milk when it is milk and then cook the final product again when it is yogurt? At a minimum this is strike 1 and possibly strike 1.5, plus or minus what they really meant with humane treatment of their goats.

With the above in mind, I scooped out the top half of the container and slathered onto a wet white dish towell lining a metal kitchen strainer placed on top of a funnel placed on the top of a glass canning jar. Prior to this I had boiled the towel in glass dish of distilled water ... to sort of sterlize it a bit. Afer scooping the yogurt onto it I then gently wrapped the rest of towell around the top to provide a loose cover while the dripping process took place. It took about 20 minutes before the first drips came out the bottom of the funnel. I stood there and watched and counted....about every 20 seconds 1 or two drops of slightly off-color liquid dripped into the jar. This began at 9PM and looked like it was going to take several hours, so I let it go all night long. By 8 AM the next morning it looked like the dripping had stopped and there was approxinately 2 ounces of liquid collected in the jar. This was my first time so I don't know how these results measure up to what is expected.

When I got home form work yesterday I took about 1 pound of Habs and roughly 1/2 pound of Orange Bonnetts and about 15 small cloves of garlic and food-processed until finely minced.* I then divided this into 2 parts with each part being abot 3/4 of a cup of minced pepper & garlic. For the one part I did the original recipe ( vinegar, salt and Sugar ). For the second part I did the lacto-ferment recipe. This way I now have a sorta small batch of each type brewing. For both parts I adapted the amounts of addititves added to match the size of the batch compared to the original recipes.

* My mash did not turn out to be as wet looking compared to the photos provided by Elf for the lacto-ferment version they did.

Right now the vinegar batch is in a jar in the fridge. The lacto-ferment batch is on a cool, dark , dry shelf in a pantry cupboard.......I assumned the fermented version does not need sit in a refrigerator ... is this right? In any case I guess I can start using the vinegar batch after a week or so, but the fermented batch should wait until roughly April...?

This is all for now.