05/23/2026
Masters Creamery
HAND MILKING!!
Hand milking the sanitary way.
So many people milk there very clean goat into a bucket and think they’ll have a clean product after straining it.
We were tested by the State for 10yrs and since then by Idaho Udder Health Systems. The goat flavor in goats milk comes from, unclean milking practices and then bacteria growth during the chilling process.
I like to think of the milk like water and the hair/s in the milk like a tea bag. It only take seconds for your hot water to change color and flavor when your tea bag enters it. You could stain that tea water after 10min, but your water is still going to taste like tea. Take that same concept into account with your milk. Milk is warm, a few hairs here and there, a little dander and who knows what else sitting in the 102-103degree milk for 10min. By the time you get up to strain it, it’s all been brewing in the milk. Sure you strained it out, but the flavor is there. Now you put it in your fridge to cool 🫣 scientifically if milk isn’t chilled to below 40degrees in 2 hrs it doubles in bacteria every hr.
Note: we did our own experiment yrs ago with this. It took 12 hrs for a gallon of milk in the fridge to get to 40 degrees. Thats a lot of bacteria filled, goat hair brewed milk🤢.
Simple changes to your hand milking practices can change everything!!!
We milk so many gallons at a time, that we use an old fashioned stainless steel filter that we put milk filters in. After cleaning the user and tummy of the goat. The milk in milked into the filter which fits tightly in the bucket then as soon as we’re done. The filter/funnel is sanitized, new filter inserted and it’s filtered into our 1/2 gal bottles. This milk is then capped and placed in the freezer or controlled water system to get chilled fast.
Note: for 15 yrs we used our freezer for chilling, but it was always a struggle. 2 hours was hard to always remember and over those 15yrs, who knows how many 100’s of jars I broke, because I’d forget. This last yr we converted a small freezer into a controlled water bath chilling system. This has changed our world and it chills the milk even faster then the freezer and the milk never freezes.
I’ll post pictures, maybe a video of our diy milk cooler at a later date.
