Got Beer?

Yuck! The French should stick to making wine, not that I'd ever buy a French product anyway. Give me a six pack of Carnation.

Rennes, France: A Frenchman who has invented a beer made from fermented milk is selling about 300 bottles of it a week.

His recipe is secret, but it combines 75 per cent milk and 25 per cent malt with the culture used to make kefir, a traditional fermented-milk drink in the mountains of the northern Caucasus.

"The idea of producing alcohol from milk shocked everybody at first," said Marcel Besnard, who was a dairy farmer in Britanny, in the west of France, before switching to information technology.

He makes his beer, which he has named Lactiwel, in an experimental brewery, and is selling the wine-size bottles "in little shops, at festivals, and at some markets".

Mr Besnard says that despite his change of occupation, dairying has remained his "passion" over the past 30 years. He started testing different methods of fermenting milk in 2003, based on the fermentation of beer.

He is not planning to increase production as it is too expensive, but is seeking a partner to produce Lactiwel on a commercial scale.

The Sydney Morning Herald.