While raw milk is in high demand, tight regulations mean that it cannot be sold widely. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, only registered dairy farmers can sell it, and in Scotland the sale of raw milk is banned entirely.
With more consumers asking for raw milk, Mossgiel Organic Dairy in southwest Scotland has a solution that addresses these concerns in the form of ‘brewed milk’.
Gently pasteurised at a lower temperature (68°C for five minutes), it preserves proteins and flavour while remaining safe and non-homogenised.
Third-generation farmer Bryce Cunningham developed the process, taking inspiration from gearbox cooling technology used in the automative industry.
It is essentially a hybrid technology that combines the efficiency of High Temperature Short Time (HTST) processing with the gentle treatment afforded by low temperature methods.
“Normally, if you pasteurise milk the low temperature way it is very inefficient. You can’t really do any more than a couple of hundred of litres aday,” Cunningham, now managing director of Mossgiel Organic Dairy, told FFD.
“We managed to create a different way of pasteurising which is somewhere between the two methods, and what we found was that we could scale it up quite considerably.”
He added that the process is highly efficient, using about 90% less energy than traditional methods.
The resultant ‘brewed milk’ is said to offer a “seasonally evolving flavour”. This ranges from light, melted-icecream sweetness in spring to richer, buttery notes in colder months.
Mossgiel says the milk’s distinctive taste comes from its grass-fed cows, which are fed a completely natural, seasonal diet that is free from concentrates, GMOs, chemicals and synthetic additives.
As well as using milk from its own organic dairy farm, Mossgiel works with a network of dairy farmers “to help them sell their product for a price that is viable for them”.
The dairy has just announced an agreement with Modern Milkman that has made its milk available to consumers across the UK at a retail price of £2.80 for a 1-litre glass bottle.
This article first appeared in the June-July issue of Fine Food Digest.
