The cream again rises to the top at reinvigorated Twin Brook Dairy
To help save her family’s Washington County dairy farm, Randi Marchezak is shaking things up — literally. While pushing into new markets real and online, Twin Brook Dairy Co. is once again bottling milk where the cream rises to the top until it’s shaken.
Her grandparents, John and Dorothy Marchezak, started the farm near Bentleyville in the 1950s. John’s father, an immigrant from Slovakia, told him to name the spread for the confluence of a tributary and Pigeon Creek — twin brooks.
John grew up in nearby Cokeburg, sleeping in the same bed with six siblings and watching his older brothers go off to work in the coal mines. He got a taste of it as a boy and opted instead for work above ground, in fresh air — farming.
After John returned from serving in World War II, the Marchezaks put together about 400 rolling acres and raised three children there along with the brown Guernsey cows for which the family would become known. In 1961, they started bottling and selling Marchezak’s Dairy Guernsey milk, golden hued with lots of cream, and delivering it door to door by truck.
Their children raised children there, including their son, John E., who has three daughters. It was Randi who helped bring Jersey cows into the mix, as a 4-H show project, when she was 8.
Like so many farm kids, she didn’t want anything to do with being a farmer — too much work for too little pay. She went to college and moved away, ending up in marketing for a giant industrial equipment corporation in sunny California.
About a decade ago, she moved back to Western Pennsylvania and, not far from the family tree, worked for Penn’s Corner Farm Alliance, connecting this region’s bounty to customers who appreciate local quality food. One was chef Chad Townsend, who came in for ingredients for the artisan ice cream he and his wife, Lauren, were starting to make at home.
Making small talk, Mr. Townsend mentioned his interest in Jersey milk, renowned for its high fat content, richer and more rare than that of common Holsteins. Ms. Manchezak filed away that fact.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her family (because her dad keeps things to himself), the farm was in trouble. He was selling bulk milk to a regional dairy, but like many in a difficult industry, losing money on every cow. He was so deep in debt, he decided to sell the herd — about 100 Guernseys, Jerseys and Holsteins.
The realization was devastating, especially to family members who still help, such as his sister, Patty, and to Randi, who lives in Morningside. She liked to visit those cute cows, “like giant puppy dogs . ... You can’t not love them.”
The farm is “one of the only things in my life that’s been constant,” she says.
So she made a deal with her dad. If he’d keep farming, she’d help ... do something. She didn’t know what yet, but “I didn’t want to go down without fighting.”
He was game. Then, she emailed Mr. Townsend, now making Millie’s Homemade Ice Cream and selling it at shops across the city. The farm had kept about 20 cows — Guernseys and Jerseys. Was he interested in their milk?
“Yes,” he answered. “I want all of the milk, period.”
The deal was sealed when he came to the farm and tasted it raw, straight from the cow.
Over the past two years, he and Ms. Manchezak have worked out a very unusual arrangement: He would use Twin Brook’s milk to make ice cream in Millie’s new production headquarters in Homestead, and she would share the space so she could pasteurize and bottle milk there to distribute herself.
“It was scary,” she says. But it was smart, if she hoped to save the farm.
They didn’t plan to launch in the middle of a pandemic, but there she was, in the middle of April, trying and failing to fill her first bottles.
It’s going much more smoothly now. The COVID19 crisis has been almost a good thing for local food, because so many people want it.
She started selling milk to her cousin, Alisa Fava-Fasnacht, at The Marketplace at Emerald Valley in Washington, Pa. Customers get it via its “virtual farm stand” and also as part of Farms to Families Food Boxes, a federal COVID-19 relief program that buys farm products to feed local people.
Ms. Fava-Fasnacht says her customers love the quality of the milk. “I think what Randi is doing is remarkable.”
A few other stores are carrying the milk, including Sunny Bridge Natural Foods in Peters. Millie’s is delivering milk with its ice cream via its truck, and the Marchezaks are selling it at the farm on weekend afternoons — for $5.50 a half gallon — along with a neighboring farm’s eggs.
Ms. Marchezak, 37, would love to figure out how to deliver milk as her grandfather did, perhaps in glass bottles. But she had to start with plastic bottles, affixed by hand with labels that say “shake well” because the milk is not homogenized to distribute the cream throughout. She calls it “cream top” milk, a variation on what old-timers know as “cream-line.”
“It’s distinctive. It’s really lovely,” says Mr. Townsend.
He didn’t remember this woman when she first contacted him but has become a big fan of her family’s faintly golden milk.
“It has a little grassy, funky, barnyard taste,” he says. “Not too much. But it’s there. I joke with her that it’s ‘terroir.’ She says, ‘It tastes like home.’”
It’s the only milk in Millie’s now, and that kind of exclusive relationship with a dairy is “impossibly rare.”
Also rare is a dairy run by a woman in her 30s. Mr. Townsend noticed on a recent Wednesday as John Marchezak delivered milk to Homestead and watched his daughter bottling it, he seemed to, uh, get something in his eye.
“I think he’ll feel less stress when we’re bigger,” Ms. Marchezak says of her dad. “I think he’s definitely hopeful about the possibility.”
Her father is her biggest fan. “I admire her tremendously,” he says. “She’s put so much work into it.”
To keep things gradually growing, she has the help of not just the Townsends, but also her boyfriend, Ben Daniels, and her sister, Grace, who’s home from Penn State University. Bottling days can mean 16 hours of hard work.
“I think we might actually look like we know what we’re doing at this point,” she says with a laugh.
Twin Brook Dairy Co. has a lovely new logo; she’s given up the idea of changing the name. “I just want it to be authentic.”
But this isn’t her grandfather’s dairy. In between deliveries and sales calls, she’s posting photos of her “girls” and her family on social media. There’s a website, twinbrookdairyco.com, and she even has her dad on Instagram, where Twin Brook’s profile reads: “Darn good, fresh milk from our happy pasture raised and grass-fed Guernsey, Jersey and Holstein cows.” There are emojis of a cow, a glass of milk and a woman in a straw hat.
As she recently posted on Facebook, she’s “THANKful” for people’s support. Chocolate milk, cheese and butter are “dreams for the near future,” she says.
There’s nothing sure about being an entrepreneur, agricultural or otherwise.
“You jump ... and you grow wings on the way down,” Ms. Fava-Fasnacht has told her.
Ms. Marchezak knows what she has to do and what other farms have to do.
“If they don’t change and adapt and do something else, they won’t survive,” she says.