Wisconsin Ag Connection - Saxon Creamery to Host Grand Opening June 8

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Saxon Creamery to Host Grand Opening June 8
Wisconsin Ag Connection - 05/29/2008

The dairy families of Saxon Homestead Creamery will celebrate their new line of raw milk farm cheeses at an open house for the public on June 8. A special grand opening ceremony with Agriculture Secretary Rod Nilsestuen, Dairy Business Innovation Center Founder and Chairman Dan Carter, and Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board Director Rosalie Geiger will begin at 1:45 p.m. A special tasting session of the creamery's American Original cheeses with Cheesemaker Neville McNaughton will immediately follow. The public is invited to take self-tours and enjoy refreshments from 1 to 4 p.m.

Creamery manager and co-owner Gerald Heimerl, along with brothers-in-law Karl and Robert Klessig, who manage the family's nearby grass-based Saxon Homestead Dairy Farm, began production of unique, handcrafted, small-batch cheeses last August. Two of those carefully-aged cheeses: Green Fields, an earthy elegant table cheese featuring a washed rind wrapped in special breathable paper, and Big Eds, named for family patriarch Ed Klessig, are already enjoying great success at specialty cheese shops, while plans for national distribution of additional cheeses are taking shape yet this year.

The creamery's milk is produced at Saxon Homestead Dairy Farm, where the Klessigs will host a Dairy Breakfast on the Farm the morning of June 8. The Klessigs and Heimerls converted their conventional dairy to a rotational grazing operation in 1989. That experience became the family's "a-ha moment" as they turned their herd of Holstein cows out of the barn onto pasture for the first time and witnessed pure pleasure on the faces of the cows.

The creamery itself is a former beer warehouse that sat empty and was transformed into a state-of-the-art creamery last year by the Saxon partners. Both the creamery and farm are installing an Environmental Management System and applying to be Green Tier certified by the state.

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