Goat milk?

If you say goat milk, people say 'ew'. Even people who have never tasted it.

Goat cheese is popular and a lot of people can't get enough of it. But goat milk?

OF COURSE we tasted goat milk before we bought Monique! And it was good. We also read a lot about it, and the prevailing wisdom was that if goat's milk is handled right, it tastes like...milk.

When we first started milking, Monique's milk didn't taste as good as it had at Judy's.

That meant figuring out what about our handling of it was making it less than delicious.

The list of possibilities from goat books and magazines included:

Dirty containers
Not filtering the milk fast enough
Not chilling it fast enough
Hereditary off-flavor (in a rare goat)
Exposure to sunlight
Exposure to aluminum.

Exposure to aluminum? I had bought a cute little milk pail made of aluminum and that's what I was pouring the milk into. Instant blech.

We converted the milk pail into a flower pot.

The process from goat to bottle is another topic, as you will soon see, but I did learn from this list that even sunlight had a bad effect on the taste. No wonder goat's milk had a bad reputation. You had to handle it just right.

It took us about two months to get our technique down so that the milk tasted like nothing but wholesome fresh whole milk. And then it became a cornerstone of our diet.