Hi,
We have some jersey cows and make cheese from their milk (around 200L) every 3th day. We leave the whey in a barrel for the little bit of cream we still get. I always take the cream off once in the evening and once again in the morning.
Until a couple of weeks ago this worked very well.. We have a old electric butter churner. The cream stays in the fridge untill I make butter the same evening. When I'm ready to make butter, I take it out, add some warm water until it is around 15°C and put the machine on.. Normally I have butter after maybe 10 minutes I think.
The last times, it took ages! More that half an hour before I have something that looks like butter. And when I finally have butter, it is a lot of very small pieces instead of the nice butter I had before. After kneading it to get the last water out, it looks ok, but is is also harder to knead it..
Final product is fine, but it takes me almost 2 hours before I'm finished (I do 2 batches of 4/5 L of cream)
It is the time of year that the cows change from grazing on the pasture to only hay (grass and alfa alfa). When they grazed on the pasture, they didn't get the alfa alfa hay, but do eat normal hay next to the fresh grass.
It also got a lot colder, outside and in the cheesekitchen, so a lot of factors changed..
Any ideas how to solve it? Anyone else having troubles like this?
