Hemp milk is the easiest plant milk to make at home and one of the hardest to buy well — no soaking, no straining if you do not want to, and five minutes start to finish.
No soaking, because hulled hemp seed is soft already. That is the whole reason this is easier than almond.
Everything in at once. A proper blender gets it silky; a stick blender gets it most of the way and you will want to strain.
Through a nut-milk bag or a clean tea towel for a smooth milk; skip it entirely for something thicker with more fibre, which is better on cereal than in coffee.
Four days in the fridge. It has no preservatives and no gums, so it behaves like something you made rather than something you bought.
It separates within an hour. That is not a fault — see below.
A carton of plant milk that stays uniform for a week is holding itself together with added emulsifiers and gums — gellan, locust bean, sunflower lecithin. There is nothing sinister about them, but they are what stops separation, and homemade milk has none of them.
So separation is the honest behaviour of ground seed suspended in water. Shake the bottle. The same is true of the better shop-bought ones, which is why they say so on the label.
Commercial hemp milk usually runs somewhere around 2–5% seed. The rest is water, gums, a little oil and sugar, and often added calcium and B12 — which are a genuine advantage, not a filler.
Two to four times the seed, no gums, and you decide the sweetness. It tastes markedly more of hemp, which is either the point or the objection.
If plant milk is the main milk in your house, the fortification in a carton is doing real work and homemade does not replace it. If it is for coffee and cereal alongside other things, the jug wins on taste and cost without much argument.
Hemp protein is earthy and does not vanish into a drink. Banana carries it best; cocoa and dates cover it; berries fight it. Two tablespoons is a serving.
Best with banana, cocoa, datesUnstrained hemp milk splits in very hot coffee. Strain it, warm it gently first, and pour the coffee into the milk rather than the other way round.
Froths poorly and honestlyHemp milk takes spice well — turmeric, cardamom, cinnamon. Warm it, do not boil it, for the same reason as everything else on this site.
Warm, never boiledIf you strained, you have around 40 g of damp hemp pulp and it is not waste. Dry it in a low oven and it becomes a coarse flour for crackers and oatcakes. Wet, it goes straight into porridge, a bolognese, or a batch of bars from the snacking formula. It keeps three days in the fridge and freezes well in a flat bag.
Warm it, do not boil it. Boiling splits homemade milk and dulls the flavour of any of it. Gentle heat in a pan, off before it steams properly.
Not well. There is not much protein of the right kind to hold a foam, so shop “barista” versions add exactly that. Homemade makes a thin, short-lived foam and a very good flat drink.
Yes, but soak it for a few hours first and strain properly afterwards — the shells are gritty and will not blend away. Hulled seed is worth the small extra cost here.
No. Four days, cold, and use your nose. There is nothing in it preserving anything, which is the trade you made when you skipped the gums.