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Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

There's a very noticeable difference in taste between pasteurised and UHT milk, and anecdotally, based on discussing with multiple friends over the years, people who are used to pasteurised think UHT tastes worse, people who are used to UHT don't notice the difference, or notice but don't mind either way.

Personally, as a Brit (pasteurised is the norm) who has lived in France and Belgium, I'd always choose pasteurised. To drink on its own, UHT is significantly not nice to my tastebuds. With breakfast cereal its OK but still worse. A small amount in coffee and I don't notice the difference.

In Paris, finding pasteurised was pretty easy to do - although shops gave much more shelf space to UHT, I rarely struggled to find fresh milk. In Belgium on the other hand... near where I was living in a city, only one of 4 chain supermarkets and none of the cornershops sold non-UHT milk.

It's quite possible that if I spent <x amount of time> drinking lots and lots of UHT milk eventually my preference might change. I'm not planning on trying, though.

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Can confirm. Always had fresh milk at home, until at some point my mom also started getting UHT. We'd occasionally (say, once every few months) run out of fresh for a day, and more occasionally she'd request me to use UHT because we were almost out and my dad didn't like it.

Little me wanting to show off I wasn't as picky as my picky dad went with it. Tasted less nice, but it was okay. Then at some point as I grew up and realized what a hassle it is to get fresh (and heavy) groceries more than once a week, I just stopped drinking fresh.

It still tastes nicer, fresh, but I can't care enough to have the inconvenience of having to get it so frequently, especially now that I've moved out. Fifty days another comment spoke of, I have never seen.

Same with music: I borrowed expensive headphones once for a while, and any music I discovered with that sounded crap on my own earphones. The other way around was fine. Anecdotically my dad again spends thousands on that stuff and I'm perfectly fine with lesser quality for a much more reasonable price. I don't worry about breaking my €50 three year old wireless headphones that needed disassembling and soldering once already; I do worry about the ones my dad gifted to us (my girlfriend uses them) which are worth considerably more, and I don't like using them because I might (gasp) scratch it.

Your preference might not change but your ability to accept the different taste of UHT may change.

I lived the first 25 years of my life in the UK and drank pasteurised milk almost exclusively and found the taste of UHT to be lesser.

I then lived in Poland for two years and drank UHT only.

At first I disliked the taste of UHT but over time I grew accustomed to it.

I am still able to tell the difference between pasteurised and UHT, I just no longer mind.

I find that for many things in life where there are similar but not exact variants, one tends to prefer the variant one first tried despite both variants being potentially equivalent.

Pasteurised milk vs UHT is one example. Margerine vs butter is another (I was raised on margerine and disliked butter for years). Windows vs Linux desktops (again, I was raised on the former and initially disliked the latter despite both being generally logically equivalent).

I have since learned to be more accepting of the differences in variants of food and tech. This seems to make life easier for me.

> I find that for many things in life where there are similar but not exact variants, one tends to prefer the variant one first tried despite both variants being potentially equivalent.

I grew up with pasteurized milk. As an adult, I tried unpasteurized milk. The taste is different, was a bit weird at first. After a couple of glasses, I much preferred it over the kind I grew up with (it's just so much better), and it's all I drink now. Normal pasteurized milk tastes like low-fat now (i.e., it tastes like drinking water from a glass that had a little milk in it already).

So I don't think it's quite so simple that everyone always prefers what they grew up with. But you're right that we often need to get used to new kinds of food before we accept it.

Raw milk has a meaningful risk of death. Unless it's addictive levels of goodness I would avoid it.

I was about to give some snarky response, but a quick Google reveals it's actually terrifyingly dangerous and there are good reasons never to drink raw milk. Thanks!

I only use raw milk for making yogurt. As part of the process the milk is heated to near boiling point. And I process the raw milk into yogurt quickly, within a few hours of it leaving the cow (to avoid botulism). Living is fun!

> heated to near boiling point

If your milk is over 72 °C for 15 seconds or more then your pasteurizing it even if your starting with raw milk.

I think the risks are greatly overstated by the dairy lobby. My family drank raw milk from our own cows and goats for the better part of 10 years, and none of us ever got sick as a result.

Of course our animal accommodations and milking practices were much cleaner than what one might find at commercial scale. But that's not a problem inherent in raw milk, but rather the same unsanitary conditions that plague the industry at large.

It's important to look for actual statistics, milk is a leading cause of food born illness even with pasteurization. Abstractly the risk is not that high however food safty is a major issue: the overall annual estimate of the total burden of disease due to contaminated food consumed in the United States is 47.8 million illnesses, 127,839 hospitalizations, and 3,037 deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/questions-and-answers.ht...

Milk is a funny thing, being a rich medium for bacteria.

Take a pint of fresh-from-the-cow milk and a pint of your typical store-bought pasteurized milk and leave them open on the counter for 2 or 3 days at room temperature. The former will turn into a tart, pleasant smelling mix of curds and whey I'd be willing to taste and possibly consume while the latter will be a smelly, gag-inducing spoiled mess that will almost certainly make you ill.

I've witnessed this first-hand.

Raw milk is loaded with beneficial bacteria that can be naturally culture itself to various ends, more often then not out-competing environmental bad bacterial. Pasteurized milk, devoid of most bacteria to start, will (most often) be overrun by bacteria that will make people ill. I does not surprise me that our "normal" milk is a non-trivial vector of food-borne illness.

While I can understand the assumption Raw milk is far more likely to be associated with food born illness for exactly the reasons you mention. However while overall consumption well below 1% it's still responsible for a and much higher than expected fraction of illnesses and a few deaths.

Importantly, people are more likely to die from food that looks good but can kill them than they are to eat food that looks and tastes nasty.

While this doesn't necessarily mean it's safe. I've consumed raw milk that we 'grow' on our farm with happy, organically raised cows and haven't had any problems.

I'm sure it does, but every farmer I've ever met drank raw milk, so I'm not convinced it's so terribly unsafe.

For the record, I don't live in the US, and here they don't pump cattle full of antibacterials. I buy my raw milk at the grocery store, it's legal and vetted by the health authorities.

Also, yes, it is addictive levels of goodness. :)

That's why restaurants have to call it "pasta ai quattro formaggi" because if they call it mac-and-cheese it's not going to taste what Mom (or Dad) used to make.

The huge advantage of UHT milk in sealed packages is that it can be distributed effectively in a developing nation environment without a reliable logistics "cold chain" or electrical grid. Example: Boxes of UHT milk sold at nearly every small grocery store in Pakistan where refrigeration is either impossible for the shop owner due to economics, or the electrical grid is not reliable enough to support a refrigerated product section.

In a weird twist developing nations actually end up having much better access to fresh milk (whether cows or goat etc).

Developing nations encompass a lot of nations and not everyone is a subsistence farmer there.

Also not everyone drinks milk at all. Lactose intolerance is widespread where people didn't traditionally raise cattle.

Not really correct. Lack of refrigeration prevents that and not many got cows in their 600 - 1200 sqft flat

I wonder what the history is here. Neither the article nor Wikipedia really get into why the differences by country. Certainly, if one were to go by national prejudices, one would assume the US would be big on UHT (when in fact it's relatively hard to find) and countries that we would assume would be into the less aggressively processed food aren't. Maybe habits developed when refrigeration was less universal?

I agree with your general observations. I tend to keep some UHT packs at home as backup (as well as hotel-type half-and-half portions). But I would never use them on a day-to-day basis especially to drink straight.

Given that UHT has a huge advantage in areas without access to electricity or refrigeration, I wonder if it took a foothold in Europe as it was being rebuilt after the wars in the twentieth century?

That would be my theory as well although I'm not sure it totally squares with the huge variations by country. [1] There is some alignment with Northern Europe (less UHT--less lactose-intolerance) vs. Southern Europe but even then there are outliers like Greece.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_process...

UHT wasn't really a thing until the 70s. From the early 60s, Europe was booming and the war no longer had an influence on peoples' living standards (at least in the west).

> It's quite possible that if I spent <x amount of time> drinking lots and lots of UHT milk eventually my preference might change. I'm not planning on trying, though.

here in Switzerland, we have the choice between the two and having drunk both, I can assure you that I'm firmly in the pasteurised-tastes-better camp.

However, the huge convenience of not producing a smelly mess within days after purchase of UHT milk makes me still buy UHT if I don't know that I'm going to be certain to use the milk within one or two days.

I do not understand, under refrigeration it should last quite a bit longer than a few days. I wonder what the differences world wide with regards to pasteurization and additives to such are.

Isn't this a function of fat content, where 1% spoils faster than 2%, which spoils faster than whole milk?

This is easily brand specific too. I know in the US if I buy milk from Whole Foods / Trader Joe's I better drink it in 3 days. Where as the store brand at Safeway is impressing me with its longevity.

> people who are used to UHT don't notice the difference, or notice but don't mind either way.

Being french, I'm used to UHT, but I notice the difference and mind very much. But maybe it's also due to what kind of pasteurisation is used (there are apparently several), and whatever is used here in Japan for the milk sold refrigerated makes it almost tasteless to me. No supermarket around where I am even sells UHT milk (they call it long conservation), but I can fortunately find some online.

Japanese milk is almost exclusively UHT. Heat treatment at 120 degrees for 2 seconds is the norm.

You can get milk which is just pasteurised. It's called 低温殺菌牛乳 (teion sakkin gyunyu) but you have to pay a premium.

Personally I find the regular milk in Japan unpleasant enough that I basically stopped drinking milk after moving here.

I thought the norm was between 低温殺菌 and UHT, but it looks like you're right. The method is however different from the one used for UHT in France, which is why they can't be kept more than 10 days. However, it's possible to find "long life" milk that can be preserved at room temperature for a couple months, that is also UHT, but also tastes much better to me.

Check out ロングライフ牛乳 on amazon or rakuten.

I find the Japanese milk to be rather sturdy, I often keep it for a month or so (though I only use it for tea so a little change in flavor probably goes unnoticed).

Wow, to each their own. I prefer Japanese milk to anything I got at whole foods in SF and I prefer it to the UHT milk I had in Berlin, Brussels, Paris, and Barcelona. It seems richer to me.

On the other hand I think I might have become lactose intolerant recently. Trying to stop drinking milk to see if it helps certain issues

Same in South Korea. Almost all milk is treated at 130-135 degrees for 2 seconds.

There's one brand (named after Louis Pasteur) that treats their milk at 63 degrees for half an hour. It's more expensive and not widely available, but it tastes so much better.

The funny thing is that most of the UHT milk here is still only rated for a shelf life of 10 days. You have to pay extra for some sort of super-UHT variant that comes in smaller, thicker cartons if you want to keep it for a few months. Perhaps the rules were set when refrigerated distribution wasn't as widespread as it is now. Or maybe the major brands just prefer to use cheap, non-sterile containers. Either way, we're stuck with disgusting UHT milk that doesn't even last long, negating its only raison d'etre.

Cold UHT is slightly better, but still, coming from Italy, fresh milk is a whole another level of taste, especially if you plan to dip biscuits. Anyway, if one comes from a country where milk is blander than what we're used, the difference in taste is lesser - i.e. milk in Ireland was murky white water, and don't get me started on their 13% fat extra fat cream. Ugh.

That said if I had to transform milk so it lasted months, I'd be doing cheese.

I think the UHT processes must have really improved. I grew up with pasteurized milk in the UK and when I spent a couple of years in France in my early teens I found the taste of UHT seriously gross. However, since moving to Spain a couple of years ago I've found that it pretty much tastes the same as pasteurized milk these days, maybe a tiny bit sweeter.

Interestingly, the pasteurized milk available here in Spain tastes way less like UK pasteurized milk than the UHT stuff. Also curdles after like 3 days of being opened. I guess there are various processes for both pasteurized and UHT.

It seems ironic that France, being a country that places a huge importance on using raw milk for certain cheeses, drinks UHT milk more than pasteurised milk.

Also given the provenance of Louis Pasteur.

"UHT" milk is just pasteurization with a much higher temperature. It's still pasteurization. Sometimes this milk is branded as "ultra-pasteurized."

And either way, their man Pasteur seems to get no love.

Perhaps we can see it this way: in France, the dairy industry has long worked to produce high-quality milk products such as cheese -- delivering fresh milk to cities was thus less of a big deal.

I don't know why England should be different. Maybe because of country-folk during the industrial revolution coming to the big city at just about the same time as the British Empire fell in love with the kind of tea that goes well will milk.

> people who are used to pasteurised think UHT tastes worse, people who are used to UHT don't notice the difference, or notice but don't mind either way.

Personally, I prefer the taste of UHT. De gustibus non est disputandum.

I remember delivering UHT milk 30 years ago as a kid. It was always in the bottle with the thin neck, and tasted disgusting, we used to call it dead-mans milk.

Maybe the process has changed, but...

Interesting... I grew up in South of India and about 30 yrs ago, I used to drink fresh raw milk as soon as my Granddad finished milking the cows.. Back then, not sure if anybody even knew about pasteurization outside of big cities in India.

Things have changed a lot now though.. Everytime I visit India or my village I see Cows being injected with a concoction of drugs and hormones .. :(

Massive difference in taste between UHT and pasteurised but you must understand there's different use for either. I did a course on espresso coffee and clearly remember the teacher telling us that for the best cappuccino you should use full fat UHT as opposed to pasteurised milk. You'll also notice that many coffee chains use UHT. On the other hand eating cereal with UHT has a funny taste. Either way the benefit of UHT is that it can be stored without reliable refrigeration, especially useful in developing countries with a sparse or unreliable power grid.

As far as I know all the coffeeshops in San Francisco use Strauss milk, which is pasteurized. The cappuccinos at Four Barrel, Ritual, Sightglass, Linea, etc. compare favorably against any I’ve ever had elsewhere in the world. http://strausfamilycreamery.com/products/item/organic-barist...

Yes, nearly all commercially sold milk in the USA is HTST pasteurized. High Temperature Short Time.

This article is discussing UHT, or Ultra High Temperature milk, which is a different process that produces a significantly different taste profile.

Right. The point being that there’s no reason to seek out UHT milk “for the best cappuccino”.

No cafe worth its salt (in Australia) would be caught dead using UHT milk. Perhaps it is a cultural preference (and what I am used to), but I hate it when I am overseas and see them pull out the UHT milk to make my coffee. It just tastes horrible to me.

That's weird: no Italian barista would ever think of making cappuccino with UHT milk.

To counter your anecdote, as a French used to UHT milk, I really hated pasteurized milk at first (and my first experiences with pasteurized milk were in UK)... Since then I've lived in countries without UHT milk and got used to it and actually like it more.

Counteranecdotally, I spent most of my young years in Germany drinking uht, and coming to America for university I found regular milk "sour" in comparison

All of my anecdotes on the matter are EU (possibly all BE/FR, not sure) vs UK, so it's possible UK and US pasteurised milk tastes different (I've had many lattes in America but can't remember ever drinking straight milk or over cereal there..)

Or it's possible my sample size was too small. Would be curious to know how many people feel which way, but somehow doubt there's any good data sets for that!

Maybe you were leaving it for too long before drinking it...

That said, I had a colleague who was mad keen on getting absolutely the perfect traditional milk. This meant the proper kind of high-speed machine had to do the shaking. But it also, apparently, meant using old milk.

He would actually ask servers whether the milk fresh, and walk out if they said "yes".

when i grew up i used to drink fresh (pasteurized) milk, later switched to UHT, nowadays i tried even pure raw non pasteurized milk from farm milk vending machine and honestly i can't say difference between pasteurized, raw and UHT, all of them of course full fat 3.2-3.6%, these days i even tried 5% Jersey cow pasteurized fresh milk but that taste to me like spoiled milk and can't drink it, on the other hand i tried lactose free full fat UHT milk and i was surprised by nice sweet flavor, very suitable for children (it was surprising to me considering i noticed zero difference between 82% butter with it without lactose)

for practical reasons i prefer UHT milk, much easier to store and keep in fridge only 1-2 boxes you are going to drink

I actually grew to like the taste of UHT milk, after living in Panama for many years where the fresh milk just never lasted longer than a week in the fridge. But I prefer pasteurized still.

As a kid, I drank both. Not totally sure why. But I almost think of them as different beverages with different uses.

And for what it's worth, UHT chocolate milk is downright better

My brother said in Russia the milk is generally unpasteurized and tastes way better again.

whats the price difference between the two products?

I'm not sure, I always assumed UHT was a bit cheaper but never paid attention (or if I ever did look at the difference I've forgotten).

I just had a quick look at a UK supermarket's online site and both seemed similarly priced with some comparable options being cheaper on one side or the other. Without bothering to spend more time actually doing the maths, and looking at more than one store, it could be that there is a significant difference on average.

In France/Belgium I equally never bothered to check the price difference (I'd still be choosing pasteurised where available if it cost 5x as much), but anecdotally I saw it more in higher-end (most expensive) supermarket chains.

There are actually three. Vat pasteurization is the oldest, it involves holding milk at 145 deg. F for half an hour. High temperature, short time (HTST) pasteurization involves bringing milk to 161 deg. F for 16 seconds. And Ultra-pasteurization, or the ultra high temperature (UHT) process, involves bringing the milk to 280 deg. F for 2 seconds.

Time is money, so vat pasteurized milk is more expensive than HTST milk which is more expensive than UHT milk. The downside of higher temperatures is that more of the flavor compounds tend to be destroyed in the process. This has a secondary effect of driving the milk producer towards lower milk quality, since it all tastes the same after the UHT process.

My mum used to buy pasteurised and when I moved out I mistakenly started buying UHT, not really caring for the difference. It doesn't taste worst at all. It tastes much sweater and actually tastes better in my opinion.

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