Victory

I can't imagine that anyone has ever drunk a glass of milk with as much relish as I did last Monday evening.  Just FYI: That's relish as in "enjoyment, pleasure..."  Don't worry; I don't put pickle relish in my milk. Ugh.  Just the thought of that makes me feel a little sick.  But to return.  Last Monday's glass of milk was the happiest glass of milk of my life.  Why?  Because it was our fresh, raw goat milk.  And for the very first time, it tasted wonderful.

Over the past few months we have been battling with the taste of the milk our Alpine goats have been producing.  We researched "how to make goat milk taste good" on the internet, we got advice from friends, we switched to organic feed, and tried almost everything we could think of.  Still the milk didn't taste right.  Things began to get frustrating.  We were milking two goats every day twice a day and accumulating gallons upon gallons of milk that was good for nothing.  Eventually we started dumping the milk out onto the ground every day just to get rid of it.  We began to wonder why we even had milk goats.  Then, as a last resort, we tried two different things at once.  1) We started both our does on Molly's Herbal Worm Formula (we thought that our goats might be showing some signs of worms). 2) We started feeding our does yogurt twice a day.  This was a recommendation of our good friends from Dallas Tyler Ranch.  About five days after we made these changes, I decided to taste the milk.  I tasted it.  I tasted it again.  Could it really be?  Then I took it to each member of the family and we unanimously decided that the milk did indeed taste delicious (aka, exactly like cows milk)!  We still don't know which of our changes made the milk taste better.  To be honest, I don't much care!  I was inexpressibly happy that night.  Those who have not been in our situation may find it hard to understand, but when you have poured a tremendous amount of effort into the goats and into making their milk taste good and have been utterly unsuccessful for months, victory is a very sweet thing.  And so, incidentally, is our goat milk now.  That fact makes me a very happy camper.

~Kiah