The milk leaves the stable warm and is in the chiller within a quarter of an hour. That is the whole journey. No tankers, no transport, no week in cold storage. Just the milking, a filter and the cold. When someone asks how our milk differs from the shop kind, the honest answer is: mostly in time.

The rest of the difference sits in the goat and in what she ate. In summer the herd walks the meadows by the forest, where the grass is thinner but the herbs are many. Milk from that stretch is sharper. After the second cut, when hay dominates the feed, it turns milder and fattier. You do not set that. You see it in the vat, and later in the cheese.

“July milk and September milk are two different milks. Goats do not pretend.”

The goat herd in the wooden stable, before the morning milking — The herd in the stable, just before the morning milking

A few things you can check in a table rather than taste on your tongue. The fat globules in goat milk are smaller than in cow milk, which is why the cream does not rise as distinctly. The protein make-up differs too. Goat milk holds only trace amounts of the casein fraction that is most abundant in cow milk. Lactose, however, is there. Goat milk is not lactose-free, and we promise that to nobody.

People sometimes ask whether goat milk is healthier. We are not dietitians and will not pretend to be. What we know is this: some people who long avoided cow dairy come back for another litre and say it agrees with them. That is no study, just an observation from behind the counter. If someone has a milk-protein allergy or lactose intolerance, goat milk will not solve it. That is a conversation for a doctor, not a cheesemaker.

For us it is enough that it is fresh, and that we know which goat and which week it came from. The rest is taste.