There are two dairies near me that I purchase from, but the characteristics of each's milk varies quite noticeably. Dairy A tastes just okay and goes bad after about 5 days. Dairy B tastes excellent and keeps well for at least 8 days. They're both pasteurized, unhomogenized, and packaged in glass jugs. Dairy A milks holsteins (less cream). Dairy B milks jerseys (more cream). Dairy A's is whiter in appearance (less silage/forage, more grain). Dairy B's is yellower (more silage/forage, less grain). No two dairies are alike.

And better than both of them, there's a raw milk dairy that I sometimes buy from whose milk tastes best to me. Plus, it doesn't spoil like pasteurized milk. Rather, it goes sour, and when it sours, I can still use it for cooking and baking.

In Germany there's a difference between fresh milk (pasteurized & homogenized) which is sold refrigerated and "H-Milch" which is UHT and sold unrefrigerated.

Most people buying milk to drink get the fresh stuff. It also tastes much much better IMO than the UHT milk.

No absolutes in matters of taste though.

Believe it or not, the best major milk I've had is Walmart's great value brand organic. It's not as good as many of the independent dairies, but definitely the best major I've had. It comes in plastic and I believe it's UHT. I don't like to buy stuff in the paper cartons because it's usually not actual wax but PTFE/PFOA based coatings.

I wasn't trying to say the plastic is the cause of the taste difference. I emphasized the plastic in the US because thats been my observation. However if you check the expiration dates in the US, milk in plastic tends to expire much more quickly than the milk in paper cartons. So there is more going on than it simply being different containers.

Without further details, I'm guessing that "milk in paper cartons" has been UHT-treated, which means it could last even longer than the published expiry date.

It'll still go bad in a few days or weeks once it has been opened, depending on how it has been stored.

Google cone-shaped milk cartons. Interesting bit of historical trivia.

FWIW, I do have a preference, I think milk is best drunk straight from a paper carton (in single servings, milk from the plastic "milk chugs" has always tasted worse to me).

Over here (NL), most milk is only on shelves for a day, they cart in new batches daily. We err, go through a lot of milk.

But the packaging itself matters, eg soda in a Al can and a glass bottle is perceived quite differently.

If the milk came in a plastic bottle I have no problem drinking directly from the bottle, if it came in TetraPak... If I bothered to cut it with scissors I would probably be fine drinking milk directly, but if I just ripped the corner by the perforation then I would definitely drink from the mug, because I hate the feeling of the paper fibers on my lips.

Also there is a thing with Americans, they just buy milk. I can't buy "just" milk. I can buy 1%, 1.5%, 3.5% and (my preferred) ~3.5-4% fat milk. I don't like 1%, it is just a water with a bit of milk taste for me. Even reading Wikipedia article on skimmed milk makes me wonder how it even can be called a milk. I read many stories of Americans who didn't like milk since their childhood, only to discover in their adult life what what they drunk back then wasn't even a milk per se and sometimes their parents not only gave them skimmed milk but further diluted it with water. Urgh!

Huh? A pretty typical US grocery store has skim, 1%, 2%, and whole (3.5%), each conventional or organic, and in a fancier grocery there’s generally a higher-fat organic option as well.

If that was a just a random encounter on my own I wouldn't even bother with making any conclusions, but I've seen it many times, incidentally some of them was after tasting milk in some other country, like in th GP comment.

It is interesting thing on its own, why there is a such phenomen and as I understand part of it is attributed to the plain old povetry (hence skimmed milk diluted with water) but tgere was an overall change in the mindset about how and how many milk should be consumed somewere around the middle of 20 th c. in the USA.

I could made the part about "some Americans" clearer, as evident by downvotes, but ehat is done...

As I don’t speak Icelandic, I grabbed a sour milk by mistake. It was horrific. Into the trash it went. And back to the store I went.

I agree with that. When container-touches-mouth I think there surely must be some electrochemistry involved that makes the drink from the aluminum can taste ... metallic.

Or it's all in my head. (But that too is important.)

... of course that could all be in my head.

Still, my lips are on the can and if I fill the glass from the said can it tastes more "glassy" than "metallic".

As a sibling comment says - it's all in our heads *shrug_emoji*

I do notice a difference between foil lined carton, plastic jug and carton milk, the latter usually tastes the worst probably because the carton is more permeable?

But I do love fresh raw milk whenever I can get it.

I wonder if it's at least partly the temperature, since UHT milk is shelf stable (for a good while anyway) you might be drinking it significantly warmer than milk from the fridge?

Hardly. When I was younger I used to have UHT milk at my grandma, and she stored it in the fridge (after opening), so it was same temperature of what I drank home. Still a very noticeable difference with "normal" milk.

I dont drink milk any more due to lactose intolerance, but only one time I noticed a real difference in milk taste, and that was when the milk very super-clearly to me tasted of almonds.

UHT (and longer-shelf life) milk became pretty popular in Germany during the late 90s I think. I'd speculate it's because it's much more convenient due to smaller fridges, as well as discounters (which are very popular) selling it for very cheap.

I will also agree with the other commenter that the type of heat treatment is the most obvious factor in how milk tastes, and that I've heard people from abroad comment on this. Though I've never had US milk so IDK.

Do they sell lactose-free milk where you are? it's quite standard in France, you can get full/semi/skim in lactose-free variants

Personally I'm not a fan of ESL and would seek out the remaining HTST brands, but it's eminently preferable to UHT.

I always hated plastic milk as a kid. Nobody else seemed to notice the difference though. I sometimes wonder if there’s only a small subset of the population that can notice it.

(I put "Mexican" in quotes above, because standard Coke sold in Mexico in the past 10 years or so is made with HFCS just like in the US. The bottled cane sugar Coke is only made as a specialty product.)

For my money the elusive perfect Coke comes from a soda fountain that's adjusted just so. Couldn't tell you what's different, but some just nail the perfect carbonation level and syrup ratio. When I find one, I usually have three or four in rapturous joy, because it'll be months before I find one again.

Dixie was a beer sold and made in Louisiana. Part of the process had them storing the beer in fresh barrels. It made the canned beer taste like it had been in milk cartons. Very unpleasant.

Although I have read that apparently a fair proportion of milk in the US is made with equipment that uses PVC piping that leeches phthalates before it's even packaged...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1367856/

It appears to be almost none:

https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/lab-pla...

I know there's wide variety in plastics. Be careful about cherry picking studies that show no harm, you can do it with lead if you really want. The situation isn't as dire, but I think the actual impact on animals is more up in the air than a brief survey of the literature suggests.

"Who are the peoples who have achieved, who have become large, strong, vigorous people, who have reduced their infant mortality, who have the best trades in the world, who have an appreciation for art and literature and music, who are progressive in science and every activity of the human intellect? They are the people who have patronized the dairy industry."

good milk definitely sounds worth trying

I was born in the early 50s and my folks were Californians from small-town Minnesota, so I'm used to the idea of very sweet dishes being considered okay at all meals. An example, my mom picked up from her Dutch-immigrant mother, a breakfast dish made from thoroughly dried out bread scraps, simmered in milk with cinnamon and liberal amounts of sugar. They called it (I don't know the Dutch spelling) stoot-uh-bray (phonetic) which I suspect meant something like stewed bread. Loved it and the many other fattening 30s concepts of what constituted a proper meal. A slightly less chocolatey version of homemade pudding over graham crackers was considered a perfectly acceptable lunch, Grandma called it cocoa-dope. And though no one pushed my mom to cook all our meals, it was clear she felt it a failure if any of us in our family of six found it necessary to prepare their own meal. Dad was a railroad conductor on 24-hr call. When he got called, she got up and prepared him a meal and/or lunch, regardless of time of day or night. He simply could not break her of this habit. But yeah, my folks and their folks definitely grew up on a diet resembling at least some of what the article referenced, and held similarly strong attitudes about the kitchen being the center of home culture. Sit down meals for the whole family were mandatory until such time as we left home. No TV or radio during meals, just conversation. Not such a bad deal, really -- three mandatory whole-family conversations a day -- two if school was in session. Occasionally I used to quickly walk the 600-yards home (from elementary school) for lunch. Some days I'd trade my homemade-bread sandwich for one of my schoolmates Wonder Bread sandwiches at the outdoor lunch tables of elementary school, both parties usually felt they got the better of the deal. Different times, different attitudes.

Some people notice a significant taste difference between UHT milk and non-UHT milk.

You mean some people don't? They taste radically different (I like both btw).