CREAM-RIPENING. 203 



mixed, or should they be treated separately according to 

 quality, and made up into several grades of butter? Theoret- 

 ically the grading of cream into two or three, or even four, 

 grades can be argued to be correct and proper, yet in creameries 

 where only a comparatively small amount of cream is handled, 

 it usually does not pay to grade very much. In a very large 

 plant where as much as 50,000 pounds of butter is made per 

 day, there is no question that a system of grading cream pays. 

 Several large central plants are now grading their cream into 

 three or four grades successfully. In smaller plants, however, 

 it is not as a rule advisable to make more than two grades, 

 the first grade to include all good and fair cream, and the 

 second grade to include the very poorest. Usually in the 

 comparatively small creamery plants, the quality of cream can 

 be better controlled, and consequently less grading is necessary, 

 while in a large plant the creamery manager has but little con- 

 trol over the conditions governing the quality of the cream. 



The chief conditions that determine whether different 

 qualities of cream should be mixed, might be said to depend 

 upon: 



(1) The quality of the cream. 



(2) The kind of market for the butter. 



(3) The amount of hand-separator cream compared with 



the amount of good quality cream, usually sepa- 

 rated from the milk at the creamery. 



(4) The general creamery conditions. 



i. Quality of Cream. The difficulty of grading cream is met 

 with chiefly in comparatively small creameries where part of 

 the intake is cream and another part milk. The cream that 

 is separated from the milk at the factory is usually in an ex- 

 cellent condition, while the cream delivered from hand sepa- 

 rators, or raised by any of the gravity methods, is usually of a 

 poor quality. If the cream delivered to the creamery is in 

 just as good condition as that obtained from w y hole milk skimmed 

 at the factory, then there is no danger in mixing the two kinds 



