THE STORY

Chad and Marie Miller have a passion for delicious, locally produced food. So it's no surprise that when they recognized that there was a gap in their local (farmers') market, they took the steps to remedy it.

The result is delightfully tangy and silky smooth cultured butter. Featuring limited-time flavours that are created using high-quality ingredients, many sourced locally from the bounty that the region has to offer, they are excited to offer their products to the Northumberland County at their shop in Colborne, ON.

Their cultured butter gets its tangy taste and depth of flavour from the amount of time it takes to prepare the cream for churning. Each batch is created using cream that has had a mixture of four live cultures added to it and is left to ripen for up to 5 days. The cream is then churned into butter in small 3-litre batches, and once the milk solids separate from the delightful buttermilk, it is hand-kneaded, hand-flavoured, and hand-packed, with love. 

Lofty Butter provides you with a taste experience that no supermarket butter ever could. If you thought you loved butter before, boy are you in for a treat! And if you’ve ever traveled in Europe and fallen in love with the unique flavour of their butter, then this will take you right back there. 
 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

DO YOU OFFER WHOLESALE?

Due to legislation, we are unable to supply shops, bakeries, or restaurants with dairy products. Until we are co-packing in a licensed dairy facility, we are required to sell our products directly to the end consumer.

WHERE IS YOUR FARM?

Although we ARE rural dwellers (in a tiny hamlet in Trent Hills, Ontario), we don't live on a farm - yet!

In 2019 there were changes to the Ontario Milk Act that allow us to make butter in a certified commercial kitchen using pasteurized cream. That has opened up a new market for little producers like us to actually make and sell small-batch artisan butter.

We source our cream from Hewitt's Dairy who provide us with 100% cream. This means no preservatives, stabilizers, or weird ingredients (take a look at the ingredient list on a carton of whipping cream the next time you're shopping and you'll see what we're talking about). Just natural Ontario cream. That was super important to us.

We also plan to source cream from Ontario micro-dairies in the future to offer special feature butters including single-herd, grass-fed, and organic varieties.

WHY BUTTER?

The simple answer is "Why NOT butter?" 💛 But there's so much more to it than that.

• It's delicious.
• It is an amazing base that can be elevated with local, seasonal ingredients and unique flavours.
• It has so many uses. From cooking and baking to frying and straight-up slathering. It's a staple in our household and for many meals.
• When we looked around there was no small-batch artisan cultured butter to be found.

So we went for it.

This is our opportunity to work with incredible producers and ingredients to make something awesome. This is our chance to build our community and become part of the local food system and the farmers' market family. This is our chance to make an impact on the world with a business that aligns with our values and supports things we care about. This is our chance to connect with our food on a deeper level and to use our business to help address food insecurity in our community.

We had all of these lofty dreams, and really, the butter life chose us.

WHAT MAKES LOFTY BUTTER DIFFERENT?

We always want to say "💛Love💛" because making our cultured butter is definitely a hands-on labour of love. From start to finish (not including culturing time), it takes between 14 and 16 hours for us to make 24 kilograms of butter.

We churn 3-4 litres of crème fraîche at a time, and then get to work rinsing, kneading, flavouring, shaping and packing the butter by hand.

To put this into perspective, larger-scale dairies have churns that hold 1500 litres of cream, pumping out 684 kilograms of butter in a single batch. And machines that do all the other things.

Our butter also tastes different from the conventional store-bought blocks because most of the butter you buy in the grocery aisle is sweet butter. It has a very mild taste. Ours is a cultured butter, made with fermented cream, so it has a tangier taste and smell, comparable to farmhouse butter from days gone by and European butter.

We also take pride in serving up feature flavoured butters, showcasing local seasonal ingredients and yummy flavour combinations!

IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOFTY BUTTERMILK AND THE STUFF YOU BUY AT THE GROCERY STORE?

Heck yes!! Our buttermilk is literally the byproduct of making our butter.

When we churn our ripened cream, it separates the butter solids from the liquid buttermilk. The result is a tangy, creamy, thick, dare I say heavenly buttermilk. You might even find a little chunk or two of butter in the jar!

Now, how is this different from your store-bought buttermilk? Well, there is actually no butter-making involved when it comes to the buttermilk you get in the cartons. That "buttermilk" is much more like what you would make at home if you had a recipe that called for buttermilk but you didn't have any on hand.

We've all been there. So what do you do? You sour some milk.

At home, you would reach for something acidic: vinegar, lemon, cream of tartar.

That's similar to what commercial buttermilk is. Bacterial cultures are added to skim or low-fat milk to ferment it, along with thickening agents and preservatives such as carrageenan, salt, and canola lecithin. Presto! Buttermilk! 🤨

Ours is the real deal and you'll taste the difference.

MY BUTTERMILK IS SEPARATING. WHAT'S GOING ON?

That's just the buttermilk solids and liquid whey doing their natural thing. Don't worry, just give it a shake and it'll regain its creamy consistency.

HOW DO I STORE MY BUTTER?

We suggest that you store your butter in a sealed glass storage dish in the refrigerator. Otherwise, it will be exposed to oxygen more readily, which will cause oxidation on the surface (colour change), can make it spoil faster, and it may pick up flavours from other things hanging out in your fridge. Our butter can also be frozen for up to 9 months. We suggest you wrap it with foil and put in a freezer bag prior to freezing.

WHY IS MY BUTTER MOIST WHEN I UNWRAP IT?

There can be two reasons for this. One is that we are not machines and we rinse and hand-work the butter to get moisture out - so there may be little pockets of water remaining which finds its way to the surface. The other is the flavourings that are added - we pack A LOT of flavour into our products. When they warm up, they have a tendency to seep out a little.

HAVE A QUESTION WE DIDN'T ANSWER?

Reach out to us and ask! Click here to contact us.