Straining goat milk

 
After milking either a goat or your family cow, the milk needs to be strained. No matter how careful you are when milking, small particles of dirt or hair from the animal are bound to get into the milk.
I use paper coffee filters to strain the milk into a clean jar. Coffee filters don't let the milk run through very fast but you should just be patient and let it drip anyway. If you're impatient, you may wind up either collapsing the filter and having to start the straining all over again or you may cause the milk to spill out over the edge of the jar, thus wasting it and making a mess.

In the video, I show how I strain my goat's milk and, as you can see, I also made a mess! This just shows how easy it is to spill the milk and then need to do some cleaning up. Thankfully, this doesn't happen every time, and as long as I don't get in a hurry, it doesn't happen at all.

Our goat is not a high producer, as you can see. She really just produces enough milk to feed her baby, which we are bottle feeding. My hope is to acquire one more doe for milking. One that's specially bred to be a dairy goat and will provide us with all the milk we need for drinking and cooking. Two more does would be even better since I could plan their breeding dates so that when one is going dry, getting ready to freshen, the other is in peak milk production. (Freshen is the term used for an animal has a new baby and begins producing fresh milk again.

Straining Goat Milk Video

Having an excess of goat's milk means I can also make goat's milk cheese, which we love so much, and also mozzarella, which is an easy cheese for the homesteader to make. I will share recipes for these in future posts.