Hey All,

Quick heads up: We have an immediate job opening for a Minneapolis Farmers Market attendant (Wed, Thu, or Fri)—check out item #1 in the business section below for all the details if you or someone you know wants to sling some dairy!

It’s Lucas again. Hope you’re having a great summer. We’ve got our stats to prove summer is over:

Jerry, Linda, Alise, Henry and Conan – 1 day

Lucas – 5 days

Lucy – 7 days

Those are the days spent by Sjostroms and Jennissens at the Great Minnesota Get Together.

State Fair

As you can tell, Lucy was the winner. Lucy was on a marathon Wednesday-Tuesday. Along the way she picked up Division Winner for her Senior Doe New Zealand rabbit, Raisin, and a blue ribbon, followed by a blue ribbon, then a community impact award, and finally Monday evening was elated to learn of a purple ribbon for her project raising money for Type 1 Diabetes pediatric care kits. Thanks to all of you who donated raising nearly $5,000 to help the St. Louis Park pediatric intake at Health Partners. She plans to do something this fall… more details later.

But we need to thank all the judges, volunteers, chaperones, family and friends who made the State Fair wonderful for her. The purple ribbon helps; especially after a bruising red-ribbon last year in her first-year clothing project. Red isn’t bad, it’s just not the excellence of blue. And purple is the best of the blues, so she left the fairgrounds with plenty of fried foods consumed (thanks Auntie Em’s!) and a big smile on her face.

I, Lucas, earned second place as I played part-time chaperone, worked with my customer dairy farmers and worked the distillery guild booth with Carrie (if you haven’t met her, you will next time you’re at the creamery. She’s heading up our retail/restaurant space and events… more soon!). Along with Lucy, I stayed for the final times in the end-of-an-era-military-style-dorms at the top of the 4-H building. 4-Hers are excited the whole interior of the building will receive an upgrade over the next 11.5 months.

Jerry and Linda took in the sheep show of nieces and nephew and other exhibits, while the boys and Alise watched the thrilling rabbit show followed by three hours of street hockey - why else would you go to the fair?

As for the cheese, we again had a great year for awards… the State Fair Butter and Cheese contest saw record entrants and because there are minimal categories, a few judges are judging all sorts of cheeses. With that in mind our limited results are:

·       St. Anthony – 4th Place Artisan Cheese

·       Ridiculously Good Cheese Curds – 5th place Cheese Curds

It was a good State Fair for all!

Milk, Yogurt, Cheesemas… and a broken filtration machine

Alright team, we have five items of business today:

1. JOB OPENING: Minneapolis Farmers Market Attendant – This morning I got the green light from the Minneapolis Farmers Market manager that we can sell our milk, drinkable, yogurt, and soft cheese too! We have immediate openings for someone to work Wednesday, Thursday, and/or Friday at the market. Saturdays and Sundays may also be possible in the future with hopes of becoming an established vendor there in 2027.
   You will be able to utilize our pickup truck, and we will have everything positioned, packed, and ready to go for you able to pick up in the morning, and return in the afternoon to a location we have in the  Plymouth/New Hope area. You’d be selling our fresh creamline milk, our first-place drinkable yogurt, and all of our soft cheeses (no hard cheeses for these slots). If you or someone you know wants a great market morning gig slinging world-class dairy, reply directly to this email or reach out to us right away!

2. Creamline Milk – we’re very excited that our milk process has stabilized and we’re ready to begin distribution. Here’s the bad news on the question everyone keeps asking… home delivery of one bottle at a time is likely not in the cards. If gas goes down to less than $0.50/gallon or we can do drone delivery, that can change. But otherwise we need to do stores, CSA drops or other “mass” locations. We’re very excited that we’re at the Fargo (although due to their laws, we can’t sell milk there yet), Northeast Minneapolis, Alexandria and St. Joseph farmers markets… and drumroll potentially several days at the regular Minneapolis Farmers Market. How we do that and the people we find to do all this is the difficulty, but if you have ideas we are ready to deliver milk!

The best ways to help are number one, tell your story you want our milk. Number two tell us that you told your store that you want our milk. Number three if you can reach it, buy our Milk. Thank you!

3. Drinkable yogurt – We didn’t have newsletters flowing at the time, but in case you missed it, we were named FIRST PLACE drinkable yogurt at the American Cheese Society, which receives entries from Canada to South America; so essentially we are the best drinkable yogurt in the western hemisphere. We’re excited to have it at all the markets, but like Creamline Milk, we are working to get it into stores. The Cheese Counter and the “drinkable” counter are two very different managers… so please ask us or ask your favorite store to carry our drinkable yogurt. A huge thank you to Elden’s in Alexandria, New London Food Co-Op and St. Joseph Food Co-Op for their support Of both liquid products.

4. Cheesemas Advent Calendar – It’s here and selling fast. Only 500 available, so please get yours before we have to say like we did last year, “Sorry… they’re gone; we’ll see what we can get together.”

5. Spirits – We’ve had a broken filtration machine slowing production down this past month, but don’t worry: we are in no danger of running out of Azro! We may run low on Dayton soon, but we’ll get restocked A.S.A.P., and Bernadotte is readily available.

All that said, we’ll likely be switching our main production to Azro Amburana since it tastes so good. If you come to the shop, check out the Azro Amburana, as well as the experimental Azro American Oak and Azro European Oak and let us know if we should try other combinations.

Stay Cheesy!