DUNGENESS — Sitting on the front steps of the farm store, Juniper Sackett and her daughter Ivy, 11, raved about their fresh milk.
“I was a staunch ‘raw milk is gross’ person,” until a year ago, Sackett said.
Then her sister Emma Sackett challenged her to a taste test. She put two unlabeled glasses of milk — one raw from the Dungeness Valley Creamery, the other pasteurized — and changed her mind.
“It’s so much sweeter,” Juniper said. “You could practically live on it.”
The Sequim mother and daughter were among those who picked up a free pint of Dungeness Valley Creamery raw milk during the dairy’s fourth anniversary party Saturday.
They buy their milk weekly at the farm at 1915 Towne Road, and paid an extra visit for the butter-making, cheese-tasting and hay-riding festivities.
Throughout the day, children peeked at baby calves in their outdoor pens, fed the cows in the barn and listened to Sequim’s Juanamarimba band. Many also picked up a bottle of raw milk to try for the first time.
The Dungeness Valley Creamery is among the few remaining milk producers on the North Olympic Peninsula, and one of only two left in the Sequim area, once home to dozens of dairy farms. The dairy is protected as farmland in perpetuity by a Friends of the Fields-North Olympic Land Trust conservation easement.
This valley’s other dairy is the Smith family’s Maple View Farm, a conventional milk producer.
At the Dungeness creamery, the herd of Jersey cows produces 200 to 350 gallons per day.
Since receiving their state license to market raw milk in March 2006, farmers Jeff and Debbie Brown and their daughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Ryan McCarthey, have been sending their whole, unpasteurized product to natural-foods markets from Port Angeles to Bellevue and beyond.
Making an appearance at the farm on Saturday was Tom Heintz of the former Sauer Kraut deli, cooking hot dogs and Polish dogs for lunch.
Though Heintz’s eatery in Sequim closed in October, he caters now and then, and can be reached at 360-452-6181.
The Dungeness Valley Creamery’s farm store is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
For information, phone 360-683-0716 or visit www. DungenessValleyCreamery.com.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@ peninsuladailynews.com.