Cow-lebrities the stars of TMK Creamery, Distillery

CANBY, Ore. — A 4-H project grew over time into a small dairy farm, complete with on-farm processing — including both a creamery and, eventually, a distillery — for Todd Koch.

“I grew up with sheep and horses, but I always liked cows for some reason,” Koch said. “I would buy bottle calves, feed them and sell them as a 4-H project. My grandpa suggested that I buy a Holstein and raise it to sell as a springer. He said I’d make more money that way.”

That business plan transition failed, as Koch never sold the first registered Holstein he purchased at the age of 12, finding himself attached to it. Instead, the Holstein became the foundation of the next business plan, and the family became more involved in the industry and decided to build a farm and milk cows. At their largest, the Kochs were milking 35 cows.

By 2014, the Kochs realized the initial farm model of milking a small herd and shipping milk was not working for them.

“We were at a crossroads,” Koch said. “We were just milking cows, shipping milk and it wasn’t working. We were subsidizing it to death, but we weren’t ready to sell the cows. My sister was making some cheese at home and decided she would like to try making cheese.”

From those beginnings grew TMK Creamery, a farmstead creamery that is now home to 20 head — a blend of Holsteins, Jerseys and a Brown Swiss the Kochs refer to as their “cow-lebrities” — near Canby.

“The cows are the real heroes of our story,” Koch said. “They do the heavy lifting, creating the milk that creates all our products. When you look at it from that standpoint and really celebrate her (cows), it changes the dialogue with our consumer.”

Despite the small size, the herd is housed in free stalls and milked in a 3-stall parlor. Koch said the cows average about 70 pounds of milk per day, without being pushed.

While it began as his 4-H project, TMK Creamery has become a true family business.

“My brother, Marc, is the chief dairy officer,” Koch said. “He’s in charge of the day-to-day operations on the dairy, making sure the cow-lebrities are living their best lives. Our sister, Shauna Garza, is the head cheesemaker, making the best dairy products she can, bringing them out to the retail population. My wife, Tessa, and I get to tell everybody what’s happening here and share our story with them.”

Garza began taking cheesemaking classes at Oregon State University in 2014, while her brothers began to lay the foundation for taking the farm down a new path, making plans for the creamery and bringing them to fruition. The creamery opened in 2016, with the Kochs processing all their milk into cheese and ice cream — but sometimes, the standard just cannot be the limit.

“When we were in college at OSU, I used to tell my wife that if I could get my cows to milk beer, we’d be crushing it right now,” Koch said. “As it turns out, I guess the next closest thing was for them to be making spirits.”

Koch became aware of researchers at his alma mater working on the fermentation and distillation of whey. Armed with a plentiful supply of the cheesemaking byproduct, he reached out to the school.

“It’s a tough thing to do; lactose is a really tough sugar to ferment,” Koch said. “There aren’t a lot of people doing it. It took us a while. We would think we were getting it figured out, then something would happen, and it wouldn’t work, so we’d have to start over.”

Despite the setbacks, they developed a process and tried to work with an off-site distiller. The Kochs powered forward with their dreams of upcycling their cheesemaking byproduct into a valuable vein of diversification for their business. They built a custom-made still on-farm and continued their quest to create perfectly distilled whey spirits.

“It was exciting to succeed with the challenge of fermenting and distilling the lactose,” Koch said. “We’re creating another retail product from the initial raw ingredient — the milk — that we started from. That really kind of made it easy for us to justify the initial investment in the distillery.”

By 2023, Cowcohol was included on the list of the top 30 vodkas in the world.

“People always think, ‘You have cows, of course you make cheese and ice cream,’” Koch said. “Everybody gets that part. But when you say you also make vodka from the milk, they’re like, ‘Wait a minute, what are you talking about?’ It kind of changes the narrative a bit and opens people’s eyes.”

While Cowcohol has a national distribution, TMK’s cheese and ice cream is more limited, being sold retail on-farm and in a very limited number of grocery stores. Most of the product is marketed wholesale to restaurants.

“We found that, in grocery stores, your product is kind of put on a specialty cheese island, and you kind of get lost there,” Koch said. “It’s more important for us to really have the opportunity to tell our story. We wanted to be of more value for a chef to add value to his table using the products we produce. We want people to come out to the farm and see our cows and get introduced to our products there. Then, when they see it on a menu, they remember that experience. That has a lot more impact than our cheese just sitting on a cheese island.”

TMK Creamery makes cheese curds, including cheddar and a variety of other flavors, along with Gouda, a fromage blanc and a queso fresco. Recently, they have begun adding a hard-packed ice cream alongside the soft-serve ice cream they previously made.

An intangible byproduct of their business model has been the relationship the family has developed with their customers, sparking conversations that help grow understanding.

“We’ve seen firsthand, being open to the public, there’s a lot of simple biology things that people don’t understand — simple things they just don’t have to think about anymore,” Koch said. “We’re giving them the opportunity to really talk about it again. I think that helps get people comfortable with what happens on a dairy farm.”

Consumer education was a path the Kochs wanted to pursue, opening their farm to the public three days a week in addition to hosting more than 15,000 school-aged children at the farm each year.

“We wanted to be a resource for our community,” Koch said. “I’m proud of how we take care of our animals, and I think it’s easier to show people than tell them. We want our consumers to feel comfortable asking questions and sourcing the answers. If we let other people tell our story, the narrative can get kind of crazy. In the dairy industry, we need to be a better face for what we do.”