tough question...you know? Taste is one of those things that tends to vary from person to person. Even though food taste is largely dictated by sense of smell, I suspect that if somebody has been building you up to expect raw milk to taste really bad, there may be a front-loading effect.....a mental hook of sorts that may in fact influence the overall impression / feedback your taste buds give you if/when you try raw milk.

As a youngster I grew up on a steady diet of milk produced in a small rural community. With several sibblings, somebody in the house was driving to the dairy (the dairy, not grocery store) for 2 gallons at least 2 or more times a week. I continued to drink & enjoy milk through my twenties. But, sometime in my mid 30s I'd gotten really turned off from the odor/stench that I'd come to find was increasingly attached to store-bought commercial milk. At that time I was not all that well educated on the topic but now that I have studied it a bit, it's likely that sense of odor was in large part due to all the crap that big-agri routinely feeds, injects and otherwise applies to their high-volume commercial-milk-producing cows.

Then two months ago I stumbled onto a local, small-operation raw dairy that milks 68 Swiss twice a day, they are fed/graze on grass in real pasteurs and meadows, not confined to a conventional feed-lot prison. A week before that I'd been visting a family of brothers that still run a conventional (IE> feed-lot style) dairy. One of the brothers poured me a cup of milk right out of their chiller tank IE> this is milk right out of their cows, now yet pasteurized nor homogenized....in other words, big-agri form of raw milk, although I beleive it is really not fair nor even accurate to still call this stuff milk. Even though it reeked to my senses, I drank it, and for the next week that taste/odor permeated my sense of smell/taste....like it was stuck inside me and oozing out of everything in me. A week later I then bought the first gallon of raw milk. I took it home, poured a big glass, chilled in the freezer, chugged it down, and immediately was reminded of that pleasing sensation from many years ago. I liked it. Your mileage may vary.

It is really difficult for me to imagine someone describing raw milk as awful. It is not THAT different from the store-bought junk. To me it tastes better, fresher, more alive. One thing that cannot always be controlled is what the cows eat (if they are out in the field, which hopefully they are). Chomping on a patch of onion grass can have an impact on how the milk tastes!