While not everyone loves the flavour, UHT milk has more or less conquered the milk market in many places in the world. For instance, it is omnipresent in China, where the appetite for milk has been growing by leaps and bounds. “There's been something like a 10% increase per year for several years now,” says Deeth. “The amount of UHT milk in China is huge.” Milk industry growth in places like Australia, New Zealand, and Germany has been driven in part by exporting shelf-stable milk to China.

One downside, however, to this long-lived beverage: it is impossible, pretty much, to make cheese from the stuff. Cheese is a two-step process, with proteins being sliced up by rennet enzymes and then agglomerating to make the curd. It seems, Deeth says, that the relaxed whey proteins, straggling all through the mixture, get in the way of the curd coming together (pasteurised milk, where only 5-10% of whey is denatured, has no such problem). Not that Deeth hasn't tried. He and a post-doc have tested all sorts of conditions, to little success.

“I went in one morning,” Deeth recalls, “and he said, 'I got some curd from that cheese...[but] I left at 1 am.' Cheese normally sets after a couple of hours, but that one took 11 hours get anywhere close. “I think there's room for research to make UHT milk cheese,” he reflects. But it would likely be something like cottage cheese, with a great deal of moisture.

And it would not, thanks to its lack of working enzymes, grow more delicious with age.

Join 800,000+ Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.