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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. :)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Maybe the process has changed, but...

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 .. :(

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

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".

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!

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

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

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.

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.