Butter nostalgia?

My grandmother would churn using children in the household.

I remember butter tasting better when I was a kid...
I buy some expensive butters now trying to find one that tastes like the butter I remember and nothing comes close...They're all pretty good but not as good as the butter I remember. Am I suffering from butter nostalgia or has butter gotten bland?

When I was in Ireland, it really struck me how much better the butter there tasted, the yogurt tasted much better as well.

The modern process of making buttermilk and butter begins when cream is removed from pasteurized whole milk in continuous centrifugal separators spinning at 30,000 RPM. The resulting cream contains 40% butterfat, and is known as heavy, or whipping, cream. From the separator, the heavy cream travels directly into continuous “ribbon” churns, which process it into sweet cream butter and high-fat buttermilk. The buttermilk is high fat because ribbon churns are not very efficient at churning all of the butterfat into butter. This buttermilk is then re-separated to remove the excess butterfat, and dried for industrial applications such as commercial ice cream and baking products, as well as consumer packaged goods like buttermilk pancake and baking mixes. The butter made this way is called “sweet cream” butter because the cream it was made from was not cultured or acidified. This differs substantially from the traditional method of making butter, both in the butter-making process itself and in the flavor of the butter produced. Dairy production used to take place on family farms and in small creameries, and butter was always made in small batches. Back then, once the cream was separated from the milk, it was put into holding tanks for up to a day before it was churned into butter. This allowed the cream to settle from the agitation of the separation process and gave the butter-maker time to culture his cream. The cream was cultured before churning for two very practical reasons. Heavy cream is 40% butterfat and 60% milk solids and water. Adding a lactic acid-producing culture to acidify the cream before churning helped to separate these two components during the churning process. As the butterfat solidified as butter in the churn, the fluid that was drained away became known as “buttermilk,” the by-product of butter-making. Adding live cultures to the cream also yielded a more “pure” butter, as they consumed proteins in the milk solids to produce lactic acid. This added to the storage life of butter, because any remaining milk proteins could ferment or “spoil,” making the butter rancid. To further prevent spoilage, the butter-maker would also wash the butter with water after churning to remove residual milk solids. In addition to these practical benefits, culturing the cream before churning gave the butter a unique flavor—very different from the flavor of today’s supermarket butter. Before the advent of the large commercial dairies, Minnesota and Wisconsin used to be dotted with small creameries, each with its own particular flavor of butter made from closely guarded family cultures...

However, with the modernization of America’s dairy industry in the 1940’s and 50’s came the introduction of continuous churns and the demise of cultured butter and real cultured buttermilk. Modern “buttermilk” is made by adding lactic acid-producing cultures directly to skim milk, rather than to the cream that is churned into butter and buttermilk. Although it’s somewhat misleading, “buttermilk” became the widely used term for cultured skim milk, and even though it doesn’t contain a drop of real buttermilk, the name was “grandfathered” into current usage. If introduced now, it would never pass present-day labeling requirements. - See more at: http://sacofoods.com/facts-and-info/view/notes-on-cultured-butter-and-buttermilk#sthash.k56JHNsT.dpuf

I buy the what cows eat explanation for this, that bobsal mentioned re the blandness of flavor in our butter now.

Dr. Mike Hutjens who teaches two on-line dairy classes and three dairy classes on the University of Illinois campus agrees with the late Dr. Jarrett's summary of innovations.

"Computer technology and software programs allow for continual improvement in rations, with the ability to predict rumen microbial yields, amino acid flows, rumen pH, milk urea nitrogen values, fatty acid levels and the environmental impact of nitrogen and phosphorous excreted in dairy cow manure," Hutjens says. "Balancing long chain fatty acid levels and types to predict desired milk fatty acid composition is possible."

Hutjens contends that computer technology and software will continue to advance what dairy farmers feed their cows.

"In the future, we may balance for NDF (neutral detergent fiber) but balance each fiber fraction to predict performance-lignin, hemicelluloses and cellulose," Hutjens continues. "Computers will ‘see' and adjust for feed particle size, heat stress impact on the rumen environment and pH, impact of cow comfort on feed intake and digestion, refine dietary cation-anion difference calculations, adjust mineral levels based on bioavailability and predict nutrient efficiencies-dry matter, protein, energy and minerals-delivered by the ration feed ingredients monitored by feed models."

Twenty years ago, rations were hand calculated. Use of computers has led to more complete evaluations of nutrient profiles in rations and allowed for economics to be included in ration formulation decisions.