I'm not qualified to answer whether or not it's safe, but for what it's worth I make kefir at home with raw cow's milk.

I've heard conflicting stories. I've heard that scientists tested injecting E.coli into a kefir mixture, and 24h later the E.coli had been destroyed. I've also read the opposite -- that E.coli and Listeria have been found to have survived the fermentation process.

As the end of the day I guess it boils (love the unintended pun) down to a few things:

• Trust
• Handling process, food-safety best practices, sanitizing the fermentation vessel and storage vessel
• How the dairy obtains, processes, and packages the milk

This study says that "According to the findings, E. coli O157:H7, S. typhimurium, and S. aureus can survive in kefir during fermentation."

Raw milk is either safe or not. There is no categorical claim to be made on the basis of whether milk is raw or pasteurized.

Raw milk USED to be a common carrier of TB, Typhoid, 'Q-fever' and who knows what else. Therefore, legal requirements for pasteurization.

Nowadays 'raw' milk is usually from small dairies, which sort of implies that your getting more local, less factory produced product. The milk may be much better whether it is raw or not.

There have been disease outbreaks traceable to raw milk dairies, at least in California.

Traditionally, anti-pastuerization fans were crackpots who insisted that disease was god's will and prevention a form of blasphemy. Or general woo-woos.

Local milk from grass fed cows is to be preferred. If the farm conditions are right, have it raw. If there is any doubt, pasteruized.

I wouldn't worry about it personally. Lactobacteria produce their own form of antibiotics, plus not many pathogens do well in an acid environment.

I would probably ferment it for 24-36 hours and then put it under an airlock for another 24-48 hours for a secondary fermentation.

I'm using pasteurized goat milk to make kefir and it works great.

Good fermentation, nice taste, amazing stuff for my gut so far.

I cannot say anything about raw milk since I've never tried to make kefir with it.

Michael.

I do goat kefir at home, but I have trust issues, so I prefer to not go raw.

How to we gauge "safe?" Is it by comparing it to other things used on a regular basis? There are many "safe" things that wreak havoc with and even end lives with a far more frequent basis than raw milk. That doesn't mean you want to knowingly consume something you know might be poorly-sourced, but it's impossible to just say "raw milk" and get a definitive answer.

It all depends on your source of milk and whether you trust it or not. My family does raw goat kefir, but only because we're the folks doing the teat-squeezin'.

I personally stopped making Kefir at home due to the amount of times it came out bad. I used raw goats or cows milk and fermented for 24 hours (I've tried grains from various suppliers too), about 30% of the time it would give me incredible stomach pains and diarrhea.

I used to drink several liters of raw milk each week for months and I never had any problems, I even drank it when it was sour at lot of the time.

I am a huge fan of Raw milk Kefir. As of right now, I can not handle Raw milk, however kefir I feel amazing on. Wish I didn't run out so fast all the time!!!

I would think you'd be even more confident in buying it now, because this dairy is on notice that it had a problem and probably took extraordinary steps to clean up to prevent any further infection of its milk. In addition, because you are buying it from the health food store, there are additional people making sure the milk is OK--the health food store would not want to risk it's own reputation on this dairy without being convinced that there will be no further problems.