108 ILLilNOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



In a word, as conditions do not always suit your rules, you 

 must make your rules suit the conditions. 



Now, the most important point in butter is flavor. It 

 may be salted to suit the taste, look fine, have a neat package 

 and a June color, but if it lacks flavor it is not first-class 

 butter. What this flavor is and how it is to be uniformly 

 obtained is a question that chemists and bacteriologists as 

 well as butter-makers are giving a great deal of attention. 

 Milk is a natural product and we cannot change nature. We 

 can only see that the right kind of care and food are given and 

 be clean about our stables and with our cans. The cow must 

 do the rest. 



CEEAM RIPENING. 



PROF. E. H. FARRINGTON. 



One of the principal difficulties which the writer encoun- 

 ters in attacking the subject assigned to him by your Secre- 

 tary is the fact that he is not yet convinced that any of the 

 patent preparations or pet temperatures which have been pro- 

 posed up to the present time, will prove to be a panacea for 

 i}U the poor flavors conveyed to the cream by polluted milk. 



If the cream ripener or butter-maker could always de- 

 pend on the purity of the milk which he has to handle he 

 could follow a uniform course of cream ripening and expect to 

 obtain a uniform quality of butter with some degree of certain- 

 ty, but the experienced butter-maker knows, that during the 

 year, he has many varieties and conditions of milk to contend 

 with, and that nearly all of these varieties are transmitted to 

 the cream and finally to the butter. It is much easier to 

 enumerate the difiiculties and varieties of fiavors met with in 

 cream ripening than it is to write a prescription for each one 

 of them or to propose one method of treatment that will over- 

 come them all. 



Defective butter from creameries may be due to some of 

 the following common causes, and the expert cream ripener 

 cannot always be expected to successfully remove them all. 



