WHEN a senior member of the Ice Cream Alliance told Warren Goff he had no chance of winning, he just nodded his head.

It was the National Ice Cream competition and the ice creams from the finalists were all being blind tasted by experts.

“When the winners had been picked he said to me, ‘And this is how the professionals do it – you could learn something from them,” smiles Warren, who makes ice cream from goats milk, rather than cows’ milk.

“I waited until then to tell him that I was one of the winners.”

It is typical of the prejudice Warren faced in the first few years he promoted his goats’ milk ice cream to the public.

But these days the dad of nearly three is laughing as his ice cream, Caprilatte, has become more popular than even he had imagined.

He is now called upon as the dessert expert on television programmes, including by Essex’s own Jamie Oliver.

Warren says: “People laughed in my face at the industry awards and tried to throw me out but since then I have won so many awards. I came tenth in the artisan dairy ice cream category, I was fifth in the country for strawberry ice cream.”

Completely unphased by the attitudes of his peers, Warren promptly cancelled his membership to the alliance and now makes his own way in the ice cream world with the help of those who have tried, and loved, his ice cream.

“The most common response I get from people when they find out it is made from goats’ milk is, I don’t like goat’s cheese or goats’ milk. But I am on a bit of a crusade now and want people to try it. Once they do, they love it.”

A self-confessed obsessive compulsive workaholic, Warren did not plan on making and selling ice cream for a living.

The 39-year-old of Butterfly Lodge Farm in Mersea Road, Abberton, was a marketing and promotions whizzkid for the nightclub and music industry in the north of England, and a musician himself.

He met wife Ellie, 34, when they were at Leeds University.

“We had this idea that we would buy a double decker bus, travel around the country and have a tea room and art gallery,” laughs Warren.

But life took a different course when they decided instead to volunteer for a charity abroad, the Williams Memorial Trust, which sponsors children through education and helps install freshwater in isolated locations.

He says: “My job in the music industry was stressing me out because I am a workaholic. So I left that industry and worked as a car salesman and eventually had to leave that too.”

It wasn’t until the couple decided to move to Ellie’s parents’ farm in Cambridgeshire that Warren got a taste for all things goat.

While Ellie went off to Nepal with the charity to work Warren, who couldn’t go due to an allergic reaction to the jabs, stayed behind on the farm where Ellie’s parents were the third generation of their family to farm a herd of the award-winning Monarch goats.

“They were selling goats milk wholesale and the job was becoming too big for them so when Ellie’s dad said it needed to become a proper business and that he had land in Essex, I started dreaming up a business,” says Warren.

The land, which is where they are based now, became Ellie and Warren’s new home in 2000 and the home to goats producing 4-500 litres of milk for commercial sale each week.

The goat’s milk was supplied for drinking milk and to cheesemakers but as time went on fewer orders were coming in and the cheesemaker closed down.

It wasn’t until Ellie fell pregnant with their eldest child that Warren decided the farm had to be made sustainable if the goats were going to be passed down to future generations.

Warren says: “There was a big boom in locally-produced food and people started saying we should make our own goats cheese. “But making cheese is an art. I spent four months investigating, visiting cheesemakers and learning from them. “Although I like goats cheese I am not an expert in cheese making. In the same way I love a glass of wine, but that does not make me a winemaker.

“I hadn’t eaten ice cream for years because of my cow’s milk intolerance but I have a very sweet tooth.

“If I go out for dinner, I usually go for a starter and about five desserts and skip the mains.”

It was Warren’s mother-in-law who suggested he try making goats’ milk ice cream.

Warren explains the ice cream making industry works behind closed doors. Things got worse when he told those in the industry and course leaders he wanted to make the ice cream from goats’ milk.

Warren says: “It’s like the mafia, so I ended up buying equipment and got the basic principles from reading about it and then just locked myself away in the ice cream room for six months and experimented.”

He developed a range of seven flavours, all using local, natural ingredients, and used Ellie as a guinea pig to taste it all.

He gave it the name Caprilatte or kid goat milk.

By the time he launched it in his farm shop at Butterfly Lodge Farm it was December 4, 2005. He even managed to come up with Christmas flavours.

He started out with 500 litres of ice cream and sold out by lunchtime.

Warren says: “I didn’t want to start out too big because I didn’t want to fall on my face, but when we sold out I had to go and make more and put it in makeshift pots for people to take home.”

He took his ice cream to food shows and convinced people to try it and once they did, they were converted.

Warren says: “ I don’t want to be a millionaire, but I want a good income and that means the money we earn goes back into the community.”