218 CREAM-RU'KNING AND STARTERS 



began to whey off at the bottom of the jar, soon after coagula- 

 tion, due to certain species of bacteria decomposing the casein, 

 imariabh' possessed an undesirable flavor. Samples of milk 

 which woukl remain coagulated for some time and whey ofif at 

 the top possessed a pleasant acid flavor. By selecting such 

 samples of milk for preparing natural starters, these investi- 

 gators were al)le to produce starters that gave excellent results 

 in cream-ripening. 



Butter made at the school that scored the highest at one of 

 the large national conventions, recei\'ing a score of 98, was made 

 froni cream that had been ripened b}' a natural starter. The 

 whole milk, received at the creamery when two days old, was 

 skimm.ed so as to contain a very high per cent of milk-fat. The 

 tibject was to concentrate the fat and get rid of as much of the 

 skim-milk with its undesirable bacteria as possible, and then 

 dilute the cream with fresh milk from the herds whose milk 

 showed desirable results when souring naturally. The addition 

 of a starter ripened naturally from the above-mentioned milk, 

 ripened the ci cam which produced the high-scoring butter. 



Another test was made in a national contest where dif- 

 ferent parties were placed in charge of the ripening, taking the 

 entire milk as it came in on four different days, and the same 

 method was followed with correspondingly favorable results. 

 In this contest, in which about eight hundred creameries com- 

 p(;tcd, the butter made b}' this method, on these four different 

 da}s scored the highest, third, fourth and fifth in fla^'or. This is 

 a further substantiation of what has been reported b}- \-arious 

 in\'estigators, Storch, Conn and others, that the fla^•or de\'eloped 

 depends very largely upon the species of germ life that predom- 

 inate. 



Where cream has been pasteurized and inoculated with a 

 starter containing the right organisms, the effects of the starter 

 will be more pronounced than if the cream were manufactured 

 raw or unj)asteurized. This is due to the fact that the promis- 

 cuous assortment of organisms in the natural bacterial flora is 

 largely destroyed by the heating process in pasteurization. Bac- 

 teriologists do not agree as to what species of bacteria is respon- 



