Last week, we took a trip to Snowville Creamery, a milk factory outside Albany, Ohio, owned by the Taylor family. They get milk from small dairy farms in the area and process it and ship it to stores in Southern Ohio, DC and a few other places. Snowville's mission is to make good quality milk like it used to be, without homoginization, chemicals, and from cows that are happy and healthy, promoting more sustainable milk practices.
I've known about Snowville for a while. If you life in Athens for any amount of time, you will eventually hear the name, or see it on a bumper sticker or pin. It's sold in the local Kroger. Aside from just living down here, I'm friends with the Taylor's daughter, Celeste, who first really turned me on to their milk. She and I would talk about the cows on the farms that supply Snowville, and the effort that Snowville makes to have nutrient-rich, tasty milk. I've had several cartons of Snowville milk, and I fell in love with the rich Snowville chocolate milk. It's rich and dark and very yummy. Celeste had almost gotten me a job at Snowville during the summer, even.
Even though I was familiar with Snowville, I had never been to the dairy. The job fell through and I'd never had the available car, or the reason, to go out there. So I was particularly excited to hear that we would be having a field trip there. And I love seeing how things are made. I was not let down, but I was surprised. First, it was a lot smaller than I expected. It was just a fairly sized building, the size of a barn, out in the fields near the farms they got their milk from. Pastures spread as far out as we could see, and we initially got lost trying to find it. I was told they produce somewhere around seven thousand cartons a day (my memory could be faulty here, but I think that's what she told me). Sadly, we didn't get to see any cows, since they were across the road, but we did get to see the pastures, and to look inside the processing room where they did all kinds of things from separating cream from milk, reintroducing it in the right amounts - 2%, skim, whole, ect. - and pasteurize the milk in a series of pipes that run through heating elements. They showed us the machine that forms the cartons from flat pieces of cardboard, and fills and seals them.
We finished with a look through their chemistry lab where they look at the composition of the milk they produce, and incubate bacteria that grows on it, to make sure that everything is safe for people, and that the percentages of butterfat on cartons are correct. They also had a fridge where they kept cartons of milk so they knew the shelf life of all of their products. We were also allowed to have samples of Snowville chocolate milk.
It was a fun trip, and I learned a lot from it. It's awesome to see that a small, local creamery is doing so well, and is trying to take positive steps to help the environment.
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