Mullins Cheese, Knowlton House Distillery

– Luke Zahm: This week on Wisconsin Foodie: Coming in here to the lakes, farm country, and then you come across Mullins Cheese.

– Luke Mullins: Yep, you know, processing 9 million pounds of milk a day into just shy of a million pounds of cheese each day.

10% of the dairy output in the state of Wisconsin.

– It is truly mind-boggling.

This is the big time, baby.

– Heather Mullins: Welcome to Knowlton House Distillery.

We make our TenHead spirits from milk sugar that comes from just down the street at our family cheese factory.

We’re gonna turn that into a vodka and bottle it.

Or we’re gonna add botanicals and we’re gonna turn it into gin.

– Luke Z.: Of course, in Wisconsin, we’ll figure out a way to make booze out of the byproducts of milk.

– The true Wisconsin story–started in a tavern, and now we have a tavern.

[Luke Z. laughs] – Luke Z.: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters.

[gentle music] – Did you know Organic Valley protects over 400,000 acres of organic farmland?

So are we an organic food cooperative that protects land, or land conservationists who make delicious food?

Yes; yes, we are.

Organic Valley.

– Twenty-minute commutes.

Weekends on the lake.

Warm welcomes and exciting career opportunities.

Not to mention all the great food!

There’s a lot to look forward to in Wisconsin.

Learn more at InWisconsin.com.

– Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends, only in Wisconsin, since 1993.

Just a short drive from Madison, come visit Swissconsin and see where your beer’s made.

– For generations, our bacon recipe has remained the same.

You can see it on our labels, smell it as you cook it, and taste it in every bite.

Breakfast better with Jones.

– The Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers are proud underwriters of Wisconsin Foodie.

It takes love of the land and generations of farming know-how to nurture a quality potato crop.

Ask any potato farmer and they’ll tell you, there’s a lot of satisfaction in healthy-grown crops.

– With additional support coming from The Conscious Carnivore.

From local animal sourcing to on-site, high-quality butchering and packaging, The Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically raised, grass-fed, and healthy meats through its small group of local farmers.

The Conscious Carnivore: Know your farmer, love your butcher.

– Also with the support of the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

[bright, driven folk pop music] – Luke: We are a collection of the finest farmers, food producers, and chefs on the planet.

We are a merging of cultures and ideas, shaped by this land.

[sizzling] We are a gathering of the waters, and together, we shape a new identity to carry us into the future.

[glasses clinking] We are storytellers.

We are Wisconsin Foodie.

Staying fit on the road is hard work.

How do I support my daytime muscle body, my rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, and the hardworking families that are Wisconsin dairy farmers?

Well, today, I’m in luck.

We’re in Knowlton, Wisconsin, home of Mullins Cheese and the Knowlton House, and we get to see how all these things connect together.

And I can see what you’re saying right now at home.

“No way.”

But yes!

Whey!

[gentle music] – Luke Mullins, one of the co-owners of Mullins Cheese, Mullins Whey, co-founder of Knowlton House Distillery.

I’m a third-generation cheesemaker, but our dairy heritage goes back to Ireland about seven generations ago as dairy farmers.

Dad was raised in a cheese plant.

We have a little retail shop that’s been around since 1970, and it’s been a destination for people around the state and around the Midwest for quite a few years.

People traveling up north, going to their cabins during the summer, going snowmobiling during the winter, whatever it is, always made our retail store a stop in their destinations.

– Luke.

– Luke, what’s up, my man?

– Not too much.

– Two Lukes on one taping.

This is gonna be destined for greatness.

I gotta tell you, brother, like, coming in here to the lakes, the farm country, and then you come across Mullins Cheese.

– Luke M.: Yep, we got the largest family cheese production facility in the state of Wisconsin.

So we make approximately over 20 different styles of cheese, everything from cheddar to Pepper Jack, Parmesan, Romano, Asiago.

Actually, one of the main products we make is Italian-style cheeses.

So aside from our little cheese store here, it is all wholesale.

– So we’ll do the cheese plant tour and then Knowlton House, right?

Like, you guys are– – Knowlton House.

– You guys have figured out a way, of course, in Wisconsin, we’ll figure out a way to make booze.

– Luke M.: Yep.

– Luke Z.: Out of the byproducts of milk.

My family, we, is the true Wisconsin story.

– Okay.

– Started in a tavern, and now we have a tavern.

[Luke laughs] – Luke Z.: I’m really excited to see how the whey is made, if that works for you.

Is that cool?

– Luke M.: Absolutely.

So, we take in milk from approximately 575 dairy farms from across the state.

They come in on approximately 150-plus milk trucks each day, you know, processing 9 million pounds of milk a day into just shy of a million pounds of cheese each day.

The remainder of that product is whey that we continue further processing downstream.

You’ve been to a few cheese facilities in your time so far.

– I have indeed, yes.

– What you’re gonna see today, very modern level of technology used, developed from those time-honored ways of making cheese.

– Luke Z.: It’s unique because there’s so many ways.

But today, we get to see the Mullins way.

– The Mullins way.

– And I’m excited about that.

– So the first thing that we’re gonna do is we’re going to go through a pasteurization process and a standardization process.

We’re dealing with 9 million pounds of milk on a daily basis on three different cheese facilities.

It’s roughly 10% of the dairy output in the state of Wisconsin on a daily basis.

– Luke Z.: 10% of the dairy output in the state of Wisconsin?

The state of cheese?

– Yep, comes through Knowlton.

All that milk coming from all these different farms, the fats and proteins are a little bit different, but we want our end product to be consistent.

– Right.

– So we do standardization.

– They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

And I’m really hoping that at home, you get to see the scale at which Mullins produces this cheese.

But it is truly mind-boggling.

9 million pounds of milk a day.

This is the big time, baby.

I thought I’d seen it all before, but nope.

Nope, the layers get peeled back today.

– So, let’s take a look at what a vat of milk looks like.

So the milk that we saw across the hall in that balance tank has met us here.

This batch just finished filling.

All our ingredients have been added at this point, the last main one being rennet.

That’s the coagulant.

Once that settles out, then we’re gonna cut.

Then we’re gonna have our separation of cheese and whey.

– Luke Z.: How much milk is in here right now?

– Luke M.: 70,000 pounds.

– Luke Z.: 70,000 pounds?

– Luke M.: Eight baths.

So it just basically runs continuously throughout the day, about six to six and a half times.

Now we’re gonna look at after the process is done, now we have our curd and whey.

We’re gonna go through one more process here where we’re gonna actually cook it to expel moisture out of the curd, to drive towards what our end product’s gonna be.

So once we’re ready, we wanna actually split these two products up.

And the cheese is gonna retain and the whey is gonna go away.

So, Luke, what you’re gonna see now is what’s called our salt belt.

Traditionally, you go to an open vat.

A cheesemaker’s gonna drain the whey from it and then eventually add salt, typically by hand or with a scoop or something like that.

Let that stir in.

We’re doing it in an enclosed space where we have a continuous process, where the cheese is gonna soak in the salt all the way to the end there.

– Luke Z.: So it’s moving, it’s a conveyor?

– Luke M.: Continuous process, yep.

We’re making Parmesan cheese today.

This will be eventually grated or shredded.

But right there, my friend, is about as fresh as you can get.

– I’m gonna dive in on this bad boy.

Salty, salinities, creamy.

You, of course, get the good milk sugars, but the consistency.

I want all my cheese like that.

– Love it.

– Yeah, seriously.

– Luke M.: So we want to take those little bits of curd now.

We wanna resolidify them into a big block of cheese, a 40-pound block of cheese.

So we’re gonna use vacuum to suck the cheese up.

Fill these up, and we’re gonna use vacuum and gravity.

Press it into a 40-pound block of cheese.

You’re seeing it at the bottom that we’ll see in the next room.

Package it and store it away as 40-pound block of cheese.

Parmesan.

So, once we put it back into a package, we’re gonna vacuum-seal it, put it into a cold storage for our customers to take over.

– Luke Z.: Well, you’ve got to this point now where we’re seeing this block of cheese come out.

And what I’m really excited about and where I think a lot of the innovation lies, is in the byproducts, right, the whey.

– Luke M.: Yeah.

– Luke Z.: So that’s already been shunted off to a completely different part of the plant, right?

Okay.

– Well, yeah, once we set– once we separated the whey from the cheese, that’s already in the process of going through transformation.

– Let’s talk about whey.

– Let’s talk about whey.

– All right, let’s go.

– All right.

– So one of the next stops on the adventure is the actual whey department.

– Okay.

– So essentially, when it comes to the whey, it’s majority water, is we’re gonna remove the remaining cream out and we’re gonna centrifuge that out of the whey.

That’ll go for butter production.

We’re gonna use filtration, ultrafiltration, microfiltration, nanofiltration, reverse osmosis.

So really, yeah, what we’re talking about is something that would used to be considered a waste product spread on farmers’ fields for generations, you know.

Yeah, about 20 years ago, we started our first investment into our protein facility.

So we extracted that up first, and we really strive to look for value-added use of the products that not only helped us continue to grow and stay competitive, but also brought the farmers that delivered their milk here also.

Slowly, that ramped into continuous processes of the milk sugars, the milk calciums.

And we’re finding markets that wanna use these products.

So things that we saw on the front end on the cheesemaking process, yeah, we’re doing things up there to make sure that the quality of whey is done right.

[gentle music] – Sweet.

– Yeah.

Sweet, little salty, kind of savory.

– Yeah, it’s got body, like that umami kind of, like, richness that gets all over your tongue.

That’s wild.

– Yeah.

We started in the early 2000s with the whey proteins, then into the milk firming.

And then when we expanded again, we moved into the lactose, the milk calcium.

– Luke Z.: This is truly cutting-edge.

The numbers coming through here are mind-boggling.

One-tenth of Wisconsin’s milk makes its way through the Knowlton area, through Mullins Cheese, and makes different types of cheeses that can be found all over the United States in other goods and products.

But then we have all these byproducts that are coming out of that whey.

I’m really excited to see how something that is so large gets sifted and winnowed down to this fine, tapered point that is the gin and vodka.

Let’s go get something to drink.

– Luke M.: All right.

– Luke Z.: Let’s do this.

[gentle music] – I’m Heather Mullins, and welcome to Knowlton House Distillery.

So, the distillery, we are really trying to give a nod to the start of our town, and even more important, the start of our town’s spirit journey.

Before this town existed, Knowlton– all that existed in Knowlton was a tavern, and that was where people would stop on their way in between Stevens Point and Wausau, or loggers coming down the river.

There was no town.

It was just the Knowlton House.

The Knowlton House opened in 1849.

So we named ourselves Knowlton House as a nod back to that start.

And in true Wisconsin fashion, eventually, a few years later, when people started to settle around it, they named the town Knowlton after the bar, so it just made sense.

The TenHead side of things, that’s a more personal family journey.

So we wanted to pay tribute to the start of the dairy history for the Mullins family, and that also started in 1849, the same year that Knowlton House was built.

The thing that really differentiates us from other distilleries is that we make our TenHead spirits from milk sugar that comes from just down the street at our family cheese factory.

– Heather, it’s so nice to meet you.

– Nice to meet you as well.

Thanks for coming up to see us.

– Thanks for having us.

– Yeah, do you want to come and see what I’ve got going?

– Yeah, yeah, show me how the magic happens.

– Excellent.

– Please.

– All right, so you watched the whey be produced, correct?

That’s where you just came from?

– Yes.

– Cheese land?

– Cheese land, exactly.

– Cheese land, all right.

So, the boys make the cheese in their family, the girls make the booze.

So you’ve come to the right spot.

– I love it.

– So when that lactose, that milk sugar gets down the street from me, I don’t have to do a lot of work to it because those cheesemakers already did most of it, right?

They already purified the lactose before it came to me.

The real secret is in this tank.

So this is where our special yeast lives.

So we are going to add this yeast to our whey, and it’s gonna turn it into some “beer” for us.

– Okay.

– All right?

So I was just about to take a sample of the yeast.

– Sure.

– And take a peek at it.

So these little guys have been growing for a few days now, getting ready for some whey to come over from the cheese factory.

So that was a big part of the process, is really understanding what the right strain of yeast was to make this thing happen.

And that’s kind of what makes it special.

So it took us a couple of years of work in our garage.

– Sure.

– With some home-brew equipment to really find the right yeast strain for it that’s gonna do the job and get us some really delicious alcohol that we can then distill from.

– Wow.

– Do you wanna see where the whey is now?

– Yeah.

– Yes, okay, so this is gonna be for the next batch I’m starting tomorrow, but let’s see what we have from yesterday.

– This is fun.

– All right, so this is where that whey goes right when it comes from the cheese factory.

If you wanna go ahead and take a sample, we can check what we made yesterday.

– Okay.

– So it takes about six days for it to ferment.

– Okay.

– We’re gonna add yeast to it.

We’re gonna let it sit for just shy of a week.

And when we’re done with that week, it’s giving me about a 7% alcohol beer.

– Okay.

– So we call that distiller’s beer.

And that’s what we’re gonna take into the still house to distill today.

– Funky!

– Yeah.

– I mean, it’s got– You smell the yeastiness.

But, like, you can also– – Like a pineapple?

– Yeah, pineapple, like– – If we let it sit for long enough, you would start to see some of that yeast collect in the bottom that started its life looking like this.

So, this is the still house.

This is where we’re gonna turn that 7% distiller’s beer into vodka.

So this is all one still, it’s interconnected.

We have our distiller’s beer, which has of course ethanol, and it has water in there, right?

It’s all gonna go in this pot, and this pot has a steam jacket on it.

We’re gonna heat the whole thing up and get it boiling.

So this is the hottest spot.

It’s gonna come up and over to the bottom of this still.

It’s gonna climb all the way up this bad boy to the next one.

And then it’s gonna climb up that one.

So the farther we get from that pot, the cooler things get, right?

– Luke Z: Sure.

– Heather: That makes sense.

So what we can’t see right now is that in between each one of these sight glasses is a copper plate.

And that copper plate has holes in it.

And so with every copper plate, it’s a little bit cooler than the one before.

You see that boiling away inside of it?

– Luke Z.: Oh, yeah.

– And it’s gonna hit the ceiling of the one next to it, which has a hole in it, right?

So things that can stay a vapor are gonna go up through the hole and on to the next plate, where more water’s gonna condense back down.

And so the result is that every single plate, we get higher and higher and higher percent alcohol.

By 18 to 20 plates, we’re up to 95% alcohol.

– Luke Z.: Okay.

– Heather: So that’s what the government says it has to be to be vodka.

– Okay.

– Right, so they wanna make sure it’s neutral, it doesn’t have other flavors.

So they’ve decided that 95% is the threshold, 95% alcohol in order to be vodka.

We actually take ours one step further.

So at 20 plates, I was at that 95%.

I actually have 40 plates.

– Sure.

– And the reason for that is that when we do fermentation, not just ours, but anyone’s, that yeast makes that lovely alcohol, but it also makes a few other components we actually don’t want in the final product.

The first is acetone and methanol.

– Okay.

– The great news for us is that they boil at a different temperature than the ethanol and the water does.

They actually boil at a really low temperature.

And that means they can climb this column so fast.

So everything starts together, right?

The longer they have for time, the faster those rise, and they get further and further away from the ethanol.

So they’re actually gonna come all the way up and they’re gonna come out right here first.

– First?

– First.

So we call them the heads because they come out first.

We also call them heads because people say that gives you the headaches.

– Luke Z.: Yeah, okay.

– Heather: All right, so after we’ve got that acetone and the methanol out, next comes the ethanol, the good stuff.

We call it the hearts, right?

That’s what we wanna keep.

So this is the ethanol.

It’s still 95% alcohol, so you wouldn’t wanna drink it.

– No.

– But it’s clean, right?

– It’s clean.

– Mm-hmm.

– Very clean.

– All right, so now we have our vodka.

It’s collected in this tank.

We’re gonna turn that into a vodka and bottle it.

Or if you like gin, we’re gonna add botanicals and we’re gonna turn it into gin.

– All gin is made with a vodka base?

That’s the way it starts?

– Almost all gin is.

– Okay.

– It’s not required to get up to 95% before you make it into gin, but in practice, we’re always, ’cause why wouldn’t you wanna use a really nice, pure base to start with?

– Sure.

– So almost all gin is made from vodka.

So we do have a traditional gin.

It’s called our Woodland Dry Gin.

And that gin is a London dry style with that big juniper, the coriander, all those root characteristics that you see in in traditional gins.

But we also do a contemporary gin that we’re just about to launch.

So you came for a perfect day.

We’re actually gonna be bottling it for the first time today, and we’re also making a batch.

But it does require fresh cucumber.

It does require fresh orange peel.

And so, you wanna give me a hand cutting some up?

– Yeah, I would love to.

– All right, let’s go.

– All right, this is awesome.

– Heather: All right, so you’re gonna be cutting those up.

All I’m doing is juicing them.

I’m gonna collect the juice and actually hand that off to our hospitality team.

So they make a really lovely house-made orange liqueur that goes into a couple of our cocktails.

So they’ll use this juice.

I only need the actual peel.

– Luke Z.: Okay, sure.

[gentle music] So we’ve got the oranges juiced.

– Heather: Yes.

– Luke Z.: You’ve got your rinds.

We have exactly… You know, the agreed-upon weight of cucumbers.

I’m not gonna give away any recipe secrets here for those of you watching at home trying to steal this.

No, we don’t do it like that.

– So we’re gonna take these fresh botanicals, and we’re gonna combine ’em with some dried botanicals into our gin still basket, so… – Luke Z.: Okay.

– Heather: Wanna head into the still house and see?

– Luke Z.: Let’s do it, yeah.

– Heather: Perfect.

– Luke Z.: It smells ginny in here.

– Heather: It does.

That’s ’cause we’re coming over by our gin still.

This is Bitty.

Bitty is Bitty because she’s itty-bitty.

But it’s also the nickname of one of Luke’s great-grandmothers that we named her after.

– Luke Z.: Wow, that smells very, very aromatic.

– Right, so what you’re seeing in there is we actually already added the juniper, the coriander, some of the roots and herbs that make gin, gin.

Right, so all gin always starts with juniper.

That’s the first one.

That’s the pine flavor that people get out of gin.

We actually add that to vodka, put that in Bitty, and we let her soak for about 24 hours so we can extract all those lovely flavors.

– Sure.

– But today, we’re doing something a little different.

We’re making our Meadow Cut Gin, which is our newest gin, and that one, we’re looking for something really fresh.

It’s more of a contemporary gin.

So there’s more citrus and there’s floral notes and there’s the cucumbers that you just worked on for us.

So we’re gonna add those special into our botanical basket over here.

So for the extra citrus notes we’re looking for, I’ve got some dried lemon peel here.

So that’s just gonna give us our base citrus note.

– Mm, yeah, that’s nice.

– Right.

– Kind of woody too.

So like you’re re-creating that walk in the forest almost.

– Right, but then the real star for the citrus in this is the fresh orange peel that we just finished juicing up.

So this is gonna give us that brightness that we really want.

We want that fresh, meadowy feel that we’re going for with the Meadow Cut.

So think sunny botanicals in this one.

And then lastly, we’ve got a couple dried floral elements.

So we used heather, so this is some dried heather.

– Wow, it really leans in on that smell of the forest.

– I always find I have a touch of, like, that hay field as well, which is what we were going for with that wild floral element rather than that cultivated one.

And then we also are adding some dry chamomile.

– Okay.

– So you’re probably more familiar with the chamomile and what that’s gonna smell like.

So we’ll start with that dried lemon peel that I talked about.

I’m gonna go ahead and add that to the pot.

I’m gonna add our heather.

– Heather adding heather.

– Heather adding Heather, there you go.

– Oh, my gosh, there’s so many jokes!

– You and my husband have so many things in common.

– Like our name.

– Exactly.

All right, next up is the chamomile.

And then I’ll add these fresh orange peels we just did.

And you can top the whole thing off with those cucumbers.

So this is gonna give our Meadow Cut that fresh taste that we’re looking for.

It’ll feel meadowy and outdoorsy and really that wild floral element that we’re looking for too, so we’re gonna close this up and then we’re gonna turn on the still.

– Okay.

– All right, we’re set.

We’re just gonna turn on our steam, and we will start to see that beautiful distillate coming out.

– Luke Z.: Cool.

– So you’re seeing it all today, Luke.

So we were making that Meadow Cut gin, right?

That you helped us with our botanicals on.

And the good news is, today, we’re actually bottling the Meadow Cut that they made last week.

All right, so this is the very first bottling run we’ve ever had for this new product.

And the professionals are gone at lunch.

– Yeah.

– But, you know, it could be a chance for you to give it a try.

– I would love to.

– All right.

So we we took that Meadow Cut gin we talked about.

We put it into a tote just like this that you saw in our distillery.

We brought those over.

So now this one’s hooked up to the actual bottling line, and it’s your chance.

Here’s your bottles.

– Here we go.

– First step is we’re gonna flip ’em over and we’re just gonna rinse ’em out with some high-proof vodka.

Go ahead and give ’em a push.

We’re gonna go ahead and rinse the inside of those bottles.

All right, if you let go, they’ll stop on their own.

– Okay.

– You’ll be able to pick ’em up.

So our filler is pretty manual.

You’re actually gonna put one at a time, each bottle, under one of these pour spouts.

We’re gonna fill those bottles.

So this manual filler will automatically fill them up to 750 milliliters.

You don’t need to stop it.

It will stop when it’s ready.

– Oh, that’s kind of cool.

– Yeah.

You’re gonna pull ’em off.

You now know there’s 750 milliliters in there.

– Ooh, that smells nice.

– Smells good, right?

Yeah, put a cork on each one.

– Put a cork in it, Zahm.

– So now we have this automated labeler, and it’s gonna actually use an electronic eye to see where the bottle is, spin it around, and add all three of those labels for us.

– Cool.

– Go ahead and throw one on there, yep.

– I’m gonna throw two on there.

Is that okay?

– Perfect, yep, go ahead.

– Luke Z.: This is truly a fascinating science.

I am kind of just blown away by a lot of the things that I’ve seen today.

Like, going through the cheese process and all the, you know, byproducts and bringing them over here and creating another spectacular experience for people.

I just– I’m in awe of what you and Luke are doing up here.

Thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through this.

– It’s fun to be part of the Dairy State.

– Oh, my gosh, you guys are– you guys are amazing.

[dreamy music] – Producer: Learning anything about hosting?

– [chuckles] Trying to.

To think that this comes from the milk of the farmers.

Uh, I don’t know if I could– Milk of the farmers?

[laughter] – Oh, shoot, I messed up what you just told me to do.

– This, this TV business is hard.

– It’s cool, you got it.

You’re doing a great job.

– You wanted me in that spot.

I didn’t hit my mark.

[indistinct conversation] – Producer: Then we’re good.

– Luke: Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters.

[gentle music] – Did you know Organic Valley protects over 400,000 acres of organic farmland?

So are we an organic food cooperative that protects land, or land conservationists who make delicious food?

Yes; yes, we are.

Organic Valley.

– Twenty-minute commutes.

Weekends on the lake.

Warm welcomes and exciting career opportunities.

Not to mention all the great food!

There’s a lot to look forward to in Wisconsin.

Learn more at InWisconsin.com.

– Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends, only in Wisconsin, since 1993.

Just a short drive from Madison, come visit Swissconsin and see where your beer’s made.

– For generations, our bacon recipe has remained the same.

You can see it on our labels, smell it as you cook it, and taste it in every bite.

Breakfast better with Jones.

– The Wisconsin Potato and Vegetable Growers are proud underwriters of Wisconsin Foodie.

It takes love of the land and generations of farming know-how to nurture a quality potato crop.

Ask any potato farmer and they’ll tell you, there’s a lot of satisfaction in healthy-grown crops.

– With additional support coming from The Conscious Carnivore.

From local animal sourcing to on-site, high-quality butchering and packaging, The Conscious Carnivore can ensure organically raised, grass-fed, and healthy meats through its small group of local farmers.

The Conscious Carnivore: Know your farmer, love your butcher.

– Also with the support of the Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

Still hungry for more?