Thin pale whey and water in a birch cup beside glossy black crowberries and flowering thyme on dark slate over a weathered blue-gray bench against a turf wall. — Blanda, whey and water, in a birch cup on slate, with black crowberries and flowering thyme.

Blanda, Icelandic Whey and Water with Thyme

Name: Blanda
Prep time: 15 min
Total time: 8 h 30 min
Cuisine: Nordic
Ingredients: 750 g plain whole-milk yogurt with live cultures, made from pasteurized milk; 640 ml cold water; 3 sprigs fresh thyme; 60 ml unsweetened bilberry juice (optional)

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Cold water sharpened with sour whey and scented with thyme: the everyday farm drink of Iceland, recorded in 1772, from a saga-age word.

By Forgotten DrinkPublished October 21, 2026

Recipe makes: About 800 ml, 4 glasses
Prep: 15 min
Total: 8 hr 30 min

Includes 8 hours for the yogurt to drain in the fridge, which can run overnight. Make the thyme water while the yogurt drains, so it has time to cool completely.

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Blanda, whey and water, in a birch cup on slate, with black crowberries and flowering thyme.

The story behind the recipe

Blanda is water with a little sour whey stirred into it, the thin, sharp everyday drink of Icelandic farms. The Swedish traveler Uno von Troil, who went to Iceland with Joseph Banks in 1772, gives the whole recipe in his Letters on Iceland (1780) as a proportion: water, “to which a twelfth part of syra is added,” with thyme in winter.

Whey kept for a year

The syra was the point. Troil’s skyr, “the curds from which the whey is squeezed,” left the whey behind, and Icelanders did not drink it fresh. Troil says it was kept in casks to ferment and was not thought fit for use until a year old. It did other work in the larder too: he describes meat “preserved in casks, with sour fermented whey poured over it.”

Both words are far older than his visit. Cleasby and Vigfusson’s Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874) defines blanda as “any mixture of two fluids,” and in particular “a beverage of hot whey mixed up with water,” citing medieval Icelandic texts. Sýra, from súrr, sour, turns up in the sagas as a household drink, and Egil’s Saga has a shield ruined in a tub of it. Troil wrote down a late, cold form of a drink whose name was already old in medieval Iceland. Feast ale, mead and the skull-cup myth get their own account in What Did the Vikings Drink?

In the jug

This jug changes several things, starting with Troil’s year in the cask, which we leave out. Whey drained from live yogurt is already soured by its cultures and comes from pasteurized milk, so it stands in here. Raw milk can carry Listeria, Salmonella and E. coli, the US Food and Drug Administration warns, and has no place in this recipe. Yogurt whey is milder than Troil’s year-old syra, so we use one part whey to four of water, nearly three times his strength; that ratio is our choice. Troil’s “juice of thyme” we read as a quick infusion. His black crowberries are rarely sold, so a splash of bilberry juice, our substitute, gives the same dark berry note.

Nothing in the jug ferments, so the drink has no alcohol. For the sweet whey of an English cheese dairy, see Whey, the Drink Left Over from Cheese.

Syra is sour whey, kept in casks, and left to ferment, which, however, is not thought fit for use till it is a year old.
Blanda is a liquor made of water, to which a twelfth part of syra is added. In winter it is mixed with the juice of thyme, and of the black crow-berries, or the empetrum nigrum.

Uno von TroilLetters on Iceland (1780), p. 107

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Ingredients

For About 800 ml, 4 glasses. Quantities are shown as written.

Quantities as written here, for About 800 ml, 4 glasses.

Plain whole-milk yogurt with live cultures, made from pasteurized milk750 g
Cold water640 ml
Fresh thyme3 sprigs
Unsweetened bilberry juice (optional)60 ml

Ingredients as written here

750 g plain whole-milk yogurt with live cultures, made from pasteurized milk
640 ml cold water
3 sprigs fresh thyme
60 ml unsweetened bilberry juice (optional)

Equipment

Sieve lined with muslin or cheesecloth
Large bowl
Kettle
Jug

Instructions

Line a sieve with muslin, set it over a large bowl and spoon in the plain whole-milk yogurt with live cultures. Cover and leave in the fridge for about 8 hours, or overnight, until pale whey has dripped into the bowl. You need a quarter as much whey as water; how much the yogurt gives is our estimate, so if you have less, leave it to drain longer.
Boil about two-fifths of the cold water in the kettle. Put the fresh thyme in a jug, pour the just-boiled water over it and leave to steep for 10 minutes. Lift out the thyme.
Stir the rest of the cold water into the thyme water and let it cool completely.
Measure a quarter as much whey as you used water in all, and stir it into the jug. Add the bilberry juice, if using.
Chill and serve cold in small cups or plain glasses, stirring first, as the whey settles.

Nutrition

15calories per serving

Recipe makes: About 800 ml, 4 glasses
Servings: 4

Estimated from USDA FoodData Central values for yogurt whey and bilberry juice, for four glasses; about 10 without the juice.

Recipe notes

When adjusting quantities

Keep one part whey to four parts water by volume, thyme water included, when you scale.

Notes

Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the batch.

Troil’s own strength is one part syra to twelve of water: 60 ml whey to 720 ml water for a jug this size. Made with mild yogurt whey it is very thin, so try it once if you want the drink as he described it.

If you can find unsweetened crowberry juice, use it in place of the bilberry juice; blueberry juice also works. Leave out the berries altogether for a plain summer blanda; Troil gives the thyme and berries as the winter version.

Keep the thick drained yogurt to eat.

For a warm winter cup closer to the dictionary’s “hot whey,” warm the thyme water, take it off the heat and stir in the whey just before serving.

Storage

Keep the blanda covered in the fridge and drink it within a day. Use the strained whey the day you drain it or the day after.

Scaling changes the ingredients only; glassware, ice and timings need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.