Safe milk handling is a topic that comes up often in the goat world.
While you can do all kinds of things to keep your milk safe, I want to remind you of this fact:
In early known history, goatherds walked around with raw goat milk in leather pouches attached to their belts, topping off and drinking as needed. (Hello, discovery of kefir!)
Obviously we know better and do better now–though I might argue about the necessity of many of our modern day practices–but the point remains that milk is not as complicated as it seems.
Here’s Megan’s Foolproof Process for Milk That is Good Enough:
I’ve been a hand milker most of my 17-year goat raising career. I have never pasteurized and never will. (See what others are doing in our discussion on pasteurization over at THG.)
In the barn, I milk into a stainless steel saucepan that’s about 3 quarts. It’s wide and low, allowing both teats to easily point into the pail.
Between does, I put the lid on so the pesky barn cats don’t steal a sip – and they’d sure love it.
If I’m milking so many it fills up this pail, I either milk into my large stainless pail (for large volume) or through a filter right into a half gallon mason jar, which is how I store my milk in the fridge. If milking into the big pail, I’ll pour through a filter into mason jars in the house where it’s easier to handle multiple jars.
In my area, temps fluctuate from negative highs in winter to triple digits in summer. This doesn’t impact my methods.
Once all does are milked, I bring the milk inside and place it in the refrigerator, putting oldest in the back and rotating first in-first out.
The single biggest contributor to milk longevity I have found is filtration. Back when I was uber-casual about milking, I’d milk through a reusable stainless steel coffee filter and get about 3 days before the milk started smelling a little.
This worked fine for me because we go through milk quickly, but sometimes you need milk that lasts longer.
Filtering through a disposable milk filter like I linked above extends the life of my ordinary, not-quickly-chilled milk to about 10 days.
A couple of tips:
- don’t milk newly freshened does for about 10-14 days to avoid the tangy taste of colostrum
- mineral imbalance and mastitis are the two most common causes of off-flavored milk that we see
- what they eat will impact flavor, so limit strong-smelling plants such as pine, wormwood, tansy, etc. (most goats will not eat a lot of those herbs anyway)
Great tasting milk doesn’t have to be complicated, yet another reason I love having goats!
