Touchy milk

I already killed my first yoghurt. The two first batches were so successful that the self-confidence went over my head. I did two mistakes with my third batch:

1. I overheated the milk slightly in the pasteurisation phase and it almost came to a boil. This denatures and degrades the proteins in the milk, which affects both the setting of the yoghurt, and the texture.
2. I waited for too many days before I inoculated a new yoghurt from the second batch. It was almost the last drops from that batch that I used, and although that yoghurt was very tangy, most of the yoghurt culture was probably not viable anymore.

After the evening in the warm water bath, and the overnight slowly cooling down, the milk had still not set. Since the bottle was hermetic, I heated up the water bath again for a few hours and then the yoghurt seemed to set. However, as I finally opened the bottle, the yoghurt was somewhat slimy and stringy, and without much of a tanginess. Nevertheless, I put it in the fridge up until today, and the tanginess has started to increase, but the consistency is not really that appealing. Anyway, there is nothing dangerous about it, so instead of serving as a breakfast yoghurt, I have used it to strain off into a labaneh, and I hope that it will turn out well. It might be that the sliminess makes it harder to drain through the cheese cloth. We will just have to see.

Yesterday I was a bit grumpy about it for a few hours, but then I accepted my defeat and learned from the lesson. Next batch of milk will be inoculated with a newly bought yoghurt culture, to be on the safe side. Then my challenge starts all over again.