HOPE, Minnesota — Hope comes in many forms. Even butter.
In Hope, Minnesota, Hope Creamery is behind old-fashioned butter.
"We do it the way that it used to be done," said owner, Victor Mrotz. "A lot of people say, 'This is how butter used to taste when I was a kid. It used to be every little town in Minnesota had a creamery."
Victor, a Steele County native farmer, bought the creamery in 2001 when it was slated for closure. The building was built in 1920 and was constructed as a farmer's cooperative to provide services to dairy farmers.
"Steele County had 27, 28 creameries at one point in time and they promoted themselves as the 'Butter Capital of the World.' And we're the last one left," Victor said. "We're down to two or three in the state that do it. So yeah, we're the end."
Victor's son, Hudson Mrotz, is the plant manager and a butter maker at the creamery.
Wednesday morning, Hudson and the team were busy making butter. While they typically run on a bi-weekly production schedule, operations pick up this time of year through December. Thanksgiving is their busiest time of year.
"It's the holiday season. A lot of people are baking, and cooking, and doing a lot of things that require lots of butter," Hudson said.
Production starts with cream from Plainview Creamery that gets pasteurized in a vat. The process involves heating up the cream to a high temperature and then cooling it back down. They then let the cream sit overnight.
"We pasteurize really slowly. It takes us between six and eight hours as where a lot of modern facilities do flash pasteurization which takes less than five minutes," Hudson explained.
It then gets put in the churn for two to three hours. Hudson said making the butter is a combination of high-speed churning and low-speed churning, as well as adding moisture back in.
Hope Creamery makes about 3,000 pounds of butter in each batch.
The butter then gets put into a butter packaging machine from the '50s or '60s to create the one-pound butter blocks customers see in stores.
When equipment breaks down, the team has to get creative. It's when Victor's engineering background comes in handy.
"I try to buy equipment. Nobody makes equipment like this anymore, in this particular size or this variation that we need," Victor said. "The market is so small that the manufacturers aren't even building stuff for it anymore. So we have to go find old equipment in barns and stuff like that and try to rehab it and make it work."
But the family said it's all worth it to get that signature flavor.
Victor's wife, Kellie Mrotz, does sales for Hope Creamery. She said, "That's kind of how I get people to sample it. When they're trying to walk by me at the grocery store I'm like, 'This is the freshest butter you'll ever have. Come taste it.'"
For Steele County's rich butter history, it's a final hope.
"We're preserving not only a building that's 115 years old, but also a process of making butter that is not really used commercially anymore," Hudson said. "So it feels really good to be one of the only people still making batch-made butter on a commercial level."
Hope Creamery's butter can be found at Kowalski's, Lund's and Byerly's, Twin Cities co-ops and other stores you can find here.
Their butter is also used by a dozen or so restaurants and a dozen to two dozen bakeries. Their biggest bakery customers include Vikings & Goddesses Pie Company and Honey & Rye Bakehouse.