Pot O Gold Dairy

It all started in the year of 1999 when we decided to build a dairy. The entire dairy was built out of cooler panels that we had found at a sale, where a grocery store had just gone out of business. We had to take the walk in coolers out ourselves and bring them home. It was winter time when we started putting up the walls and it was pretty hard because the cement was all frozen over and we were trying to get the equipment under shelter. Moving in the bottle washer was quite a job, but we did it!

Once we finally got a roof on almost the whole dairy, then we began building the rafters for the roof. We got our equipment from six different dairies that had gone out of business a little while back. After the equipment was all in place, we started to put in the pipeline and to get all the parts we needed. We then moved in all of our equipment.

We start the process with our Homogenizer, which disperses the butterfat molecules evenly throughout the milk. The separator separates the cream from the milk. Take, for instance, skim milk. We pump it through the separatorso it separates the cream from the milk and then the cream we get off the milk we bottle and sell. The plate cooler cools the milk to under 40 degrees after pasteurization before bottling. The steam boiler produces steam to heat the vats for pasteurization.

The bottle washer washes the bottles as we put them in. The bottles go through many rinses and washes in the process of going through the bottle washer. We put four bottles in the bottle washer at a time, but it is meant for six bottles at a time. We sort the bottles before putting them in the bottle washer and the really dirty bottles we put through two times. When the bottles come out of the bottle washer after going all the way around and through all the rinses and washes, they come out onto a track that takes the bottles through the filler and fills each bottle. The filler holds six bottles at a time and it works pretty good now.

After we got all the equipment fixed up, my mom and dad, Becky and Randall Messinger, figured out how to run all the equipment. After we got all the equipment figured out, we started on the office and the store. We had to paint the cement, the walls, and get the cash register working. it was quite a job! All that work finally paid off when we first opened the store and dairy on October 19, 2002. Our opening day was pretty hard because the day before, we bottled for the first time and we were up all night and we broke a lot of bottles. As time went on, we got better and now we have been open for four years.