Culture Maker
Urban cheese artisan Bob Wills turned an entrepreneurial itch into a business that’s helped build the state’s flourishing artisan cheese industry.
Quietly over a few decades, Bob Wills has become a figure in Wisconsin cheese as towering as the clock that gives his Milwaukee creamery its name. Launching his hometown’s first cheese factory could have been a singular achievement, but when Clock Shadow Creamery opened in Walker’s Point (138 W. Bruce St.) in 2012, it was just the latest move in a career that has helped shape the state’s industry. Wills knows the artisanal and commodity sides of cheese making as owner of Cedar Grove Cheese in Plain. And knowing a good business opportunity when he sees one, Wills gave his company’s cheese curds a name and trademarked it: Squeaks.
“Some people have an entrepreneurial thing, almost like an illness,” Wills says. “There’s an adrenaline and a sense of responsibility that goes with it that is burdensome and also very rewarding.”
Nowhere is that clearer than at Clock Shadow, a small facility that serves as Wills’ idea lab. Clock Shadow literally serves its community with Hispanic cheeses such as menonita and quark, which taps into the city’s German heritage. Also, classics like cheddar, brick and Colby.
“A lot of the objective of being here was finding out what customers liked and what they couldn’t get,” Wills says.
In Milwaukee, there was one big gap: fresh cheese curds. Clock Shadow fills that need with tons of them (75 percent of the 5,000 pounds of cheese made weekly at the factory). Demand for curds has grown with the emergence of battered curds and poutine on appetizer menus.
Curds could easily be called Cheddar Jr., as they are part of the process of making it. They’re what remains after whey has been drained from coagulated milk, and they are further pressed and aged to become cheddar.
Wills knows that the state’s cheese heritage has been primarily a rural tradition. That’s not obvious to visitors, so Clock Shadow has found a niche as a tourist spot, too.