- [Venae] You know, everyone says, "Hey you gonna bring some butter?"

So, we knew, we went anywhere, we brought the butter.

Or any function where dinner was being done, where they say, "Oh, who's gonna bring the butter?"

And you can just hear the heads turn.

(laughing) That'd be us.

- Of course we are.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Venae Watts.

- And I'm Adam Mueller.

- And we are fifth generation owners of Minerva Dairy.

Minerva Dairy was founded in 1894, by our founding father, Max P. Radloff.

And we had multiple family farms.

And he brought the family farms together to make cheese and butter in one location.

And ended up with a final location, being here at Minerva, Ohio.

- [Adam] We were a part of the family business since as long as we can remember.

Whether it was unloading milk or packaging butter.

We had our chores when we were little and the business has been part of us from our earliest memories.

- [Adam] For us running a family business together, the key thing is that you're able to have conversations.

You're able to be transparent.

You're able to be frank with each other.

- But yeah it's not perfect.

Don't make it sound like it's perfect.

- Well no, but- - We have our fights, don't worry, like everyone.

We're normal brother and sister.

We argue about things.

- Yeah.

- [Venae] I tried to fire him a couple of times.

Didn't work.

- [Adam] And I fired you.

- [Venae] And he fired me.

- [Adam] And it didn't work.

- [Venae] Our dad and mom did a good job.

It was like, okay, you're gonna figure out how to get along, or you're gonna have a terrible time.

- [Adam] Right.

- [Venae] Until you figure it out, so.

- One of the main things that's important to the community is the family farms that we buy milk from.

We're dependent upon them in order to be able to supply the milk here locally.

As equally as they are dependent upon us to have a local place to deliver their milk.

- This kind of small farms all centralized together, it only occurs in Northeast Ohio.

We just stay doing what we do each generation.

And that made us now unique.

- One of the exciting things for us is that we preserve the way that we make our butter and we are making the butter the same way today as we've made it over a hundred years ago.

At the same time, though, we have to keep into consideration efficiencies and how we package the product.

So now we've had a really nice time as the country has found that the importance of 85% fat butter, artisanal butter making.

We are very different than the commodity product.

So, after we receive the milk, we make low-fat cheeses.

And so when we make the low-fat cheeses, we generate the cream that is needed to make butter.

And then the cream is pasteurized and then it is cured.

And then we turn it into butter.

There's an art to making artisanal butter and making sure that you have the right texture and butter curds.

This is the process after the buttermilk has been drained from the butter.

And whether we're making salted butter or unsalted butter, this is a time where the butter curds are starting to blend together to become one big batch of butter.

- [Adam] It's about a three-day process from start to finish.

From when we received the milk from the time that the butter's ready to be shipped out to the consumers.

- Well, we are nationally distributed in our brand.

So, you can find Minerva Dairy, not everywhere, but it is found across country in different regions.

It's really neat to hear when people like reach out and they're like, "Hey, I found your butter."

I love it when I reach out and I can hear that.

Hey, you know what?

I'm sharing with my family and you're sharing it with yours.

And that's kind of a cool connection.

(upbeat music ends) - [Narrator] Ideastream Public Media receive support from PNC Bank.

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