Milk Taste Help

Have you ever tasted your finger about an hour after you've applied rubbing alcohol to something and didn't wash it off? Tastes terrible!

Try cleaning her udder with something else, taste the milk, and see if that is it.

Then go online to Amazon.com and order a book called "The Untold Story of Milk" by Ron Schmid. It is fascinating reading and will set your mind to rest about unpasteurized milk.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/096...t=true&ie=UTF8

How old is your infant? If he/she is under 2 years old, human milk is best...unpasteurized...

6e, we were posting at the same time. yes, goats get dirty. have you ever seen a cow dairy? GAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!! i'm betting your goats are far cleaner than those cows, and if that baby is outside, close to the animals, he/she is inhaling all those bacteria, anyway. how old is this infant? now i'm just curious

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have a great day.
when i call on Jesus, all things are possible.

Our goats have wonderful tasting milk. I don't pasteurize. I don't worry about putting ice in the bucket. I don't use special equipment. I do let them free graze and have alfalfa for them.

I know families who had to find sources of raw goats milk as it was all their infant could drink (allergic to everything else.) My dd can't use pasteurized milk, she developes excema when she does. You do have to be clean, but for many pasteurization does more harm than good. JMO.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!

I scrub my goats dairy clipped udders with soapy water with a capful of bleach in it, milk them out, strain the milk, chill the milk, when I get enough to bother I pasturize it (DONT JUDGE ME PEOPLE) and then we drink it, and its always been great....until my mother turned them out to let the free range.......and they have access to ragwed and their milk tastes TERRABLE now!!!! Now I know WHY. giggle. Does it make the milk bad, or just taste terrable??? The kids still will drink it and I can use it in cooking without the taste passing through, but I cant stomach the "dirty soapy buck" taste that it seems to me to have (and no bucks NEAR them!!!).

THANKS!!!

Joy

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Joy Alba
Oak Hill Ranch
since 1834
Bedias, Texas

Giggle....Thats makes me laugh. When Chris was a baby I couldnt get him to latch on and couldnt figure out why...finally in desperation I decided to taste my milk and see if thats what it was.....so I latched on and spit it right back out. I had had "sanitizer" (you know that antibactrial gel stuff) on my hands and it had gotten on my teat and it BURNED!!!! I scrubbed up and he latched right on, no problem. Isnt it funny how something mundane like antibactrial sanitizer can RUIN an otherwise rewarding experience??? giggle

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Joy Alba
Oak Hill Ranch
since 1834
Bedias, Texas

You can order the mastitis strip tests from Hoegger's...and do it yourself...

I think it's not storing it in glass as quickly as possible, too.

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Alice
* * *
"No great thing is created suddenly." ~Epictitus

I actually read about it in a booklet about different weeds, and it said that dairy cattle grazing on ragweed would have bitter milk. It didn't say whether it was still drinkable, but ours tasted sooooooooooo bad, no one would use it, even on cereal.

mary

6e, have you tried separating each does milk yet and tasting each one separately before pasteurizing, mixing together etc???? Have you ever milked a yummy pail of milk from these goats since you have owned them??? If you have time re-read my earlier post. If I send my herd into one location of my woods/jungle I will be guaranteed a nasty bunch of milk that evening and the following morning. We call it JUNGLE Juice and only the Jersey's will drink it...
Tennessee John

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Your liver is too important to be tasting plants you don't know about. Sometimes you can get an idea of how something tastes by smelling it. Or maybe you could find out something with a google search. (?)

I am concerned that you are working so hard for so little milk. Has someone shown you how? Use your thumb and pointer finger to close off the teat at the top, squeeze out what's in it, repeat, bumping the udder gently, occassionally, since this is what the kids do (but not gently!) to get the dam to let down milk.

How old are the goats, and at what stage of lactation? Was the previous owner milking them or are they naturally drying up? They don't have kids on them, do they?

mary

We just started milking them yesterday and that was our very first experience with goat's milk. Not a very exciting beginning and in fact, I was so discouraged about it that I didn't milk them today, I just let their babies do the work. We may try again tomorrow.
We'll try some different techniques tomorrow and if it still tastes the same I'll let you know. As it stands right now, our dairy goat venture may be very short lived. I can't imagine that milk even making good cheese, butter or otherwise.
Oh, our baby is 2 months old. I have trouble with nursing. I usually dry up really fast, although this time was just a problem with appointments I had and had to be away from her and then a case of thrush and so forth and so on.
I'm not too crazy about formula because of all the stuff that's in it and the cost. She's already going through almost a can a week at $25 a can. Ouch! But, if that's what's best for her, then I guess that's the way it's going to have to be. I'm not going to risk her health.
It's funny, we never worry about our eggs and we eat them undercooked most of the time, but we worry about the milk. Of course, we're not feeding eggs to the baby.

If the kids were on, that's likely why you didn't get much milk. You can separate the kids from the dams at night and take all their milk in the morning, and probably find milking much easier.

As to the bad taste, I understand your discouragement. Like I said, we had delicious milk until we moved here (several years.) But, if the first milk I'd tasted had been the bitter milk we've sometimes gotten here, I don't think I could have continued. If you can get that problem corrected, pasteurized goat milk might still be a good solution for your baby. But I wouldn't give her bitter milk either way. Do you buy formula in the powdered form? We found it very convenient, since you could put the right amount of powder in a bottle and add water later. Ah, those were the days. I miss babies. I hope you are having fun with yours.

BTW, a friend of mine had an Alpine with nasty tasting milk. She tasted each goat's milk to find the culprit, and it was consistently this particular goat. She told me that she had finally gotten it tasting good after treating the goat for mastitis. So mastitis will also cause bad tasting milk. (And you wouldn't want any of your family drinking that raw.)

mary

where is SE KS are you? i'm not too far from the KS border here....

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Let a smile be your umbrella against the thunderstorms of life.
have a great day.
when i call on Jesus, all things are possible.

Goats in the United States have not been shown to have T.B. Cows on the other hand are a different story. I have cleaned udders with a plain dry paper towel. When I strain I use an unbleached coffee filter. The milk is raw and tastes far better then pastuerized. Also, the colder the milk is, the better it tastes. JMO

6e,I was thinking do you wash your milking equipmint[sp] with soap. If you don't rinse it out good it would leave a very bad taste in the milk.

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Oklahoma:
We are between Piedmont and Howard Kansas straight up 99 highway. We're about 30 miles north of the Oklahoma border, I think......

Hey, not to brag, I'm just curious, but does anyone take the Dairy Goat Journal? The article about the Kansas boy is my son LJ. He was so proud of himself that he made it into a magazine. He now tells everyone he's famous. The picture is my son LJ and my daughter Rachel with our Alpine kids.

Oh, I wanted to tell you that I talked to the woman we got our goats from and told her our problem and she had two other suggestions. She said that acidosis would cause milk to be bitter and that if the milk had a higher protein level than butterfat it would have a metallic taste. So, we are taking further measures to correct that problem and we'll see if the taste changes. Our neighbor that has goats is convinced that it's something their eating. We're going to try again in the morning and see what happens.

I would feed my baby goats milk if I couldn't nurse, wouldn't use formula.
But I know goats milk is low on B vitamins so I would supplement or have the baby tested.

I would not pasteurize but I would have the goat tested. Pasteurizing kills off way to much good stuff.

Some people feed alfalfa to make for sweet milk. Some people put the milkers into a separate pen and hour or two before milking so help get rid of the flavors.

Dont give up

you're not far from me at all. couple hours at most. most curious as to who you got the goaties from, now. feel free to pm me

__________________
Let a smile be your umbrella against the thunderstorms of life.
have a great day.
when i call on Jesus, all things are possible.

Don't give up!!

Off-tasting milk is most often caused by milk handling. I think the major temp swings, from warm to freezer to 165 degree to fridge, could definitely cause bad-tasting milk. My suggestion would be to chill it as quickly as possible after milking, putting it in glass right away. Store it with a tight-fitting lid in the FRIDGE until ready to pasturize. When you pasturize, get it to 165 and then cool it as quickly as possible. Again, store in glass with tight-fitting lid.

Oh, and one thing jumped out at me from your milking description. You didn't mention "stripping" the teat before starting milking (i.e. squirting the first squirt or two into a cup or on the ground). You absolutely must do that. You do not want that first squirt or two in your milk pail. It would very high in bacteria and would probably effect the taste. We dip both before and after milking. It has been shown to reduce mastitis much more then only post-milking dipping. I would switch from alcohol to a teat dip, or two a bleach solution.

As for all the opinions on raw vs. pasturized... It's par for the course. Everyone has pretty strong opinions about it, whichever side they're on. You have to do what's comfortable for you. My advice is this, FWIW. If you were very experienced with goats and milking, and if you had these goats for a long while and were very sure of their health, then the raw milk would be a great second choice for a baby (with human milk being the #1 choice.) BUT, you're new to goats, new to milking, having funky-tasting milk, etc. It is absolutely not worth the risk to give it raw. We were in a similar situation when we started milking, although my daughter was 18 months. I pasturized for a good 6 or 8 months before I felt comfortable using it raw. And our pasturized tasted almost as good as our raw, when handled properly. So it's definitely possibly to get good-tasting milk, even with pasturizing.

One thing you could try is YOU tasting the milk raw, as soon as it's chilled right after milking. If the bad taste is there then, you've eliminated the handling as a cause of the bad taste.

Hang in there. It will be worth it when you have it figured out.

As far as quick chilling the raw milk I use a stainless bucket that's half filled with water. The bucket is kept in the barn refrigerator 24hours a day so that the water is ice cold. Simply strain your milk into a glass container and drop the container into the bucket that's kept in the fridge. It's a extremely quick heat transfer and chilling of the milk. The water in the bucket can be used over and over again providing you are rinsing the glass jars if needed after straining. Tennessee John

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