Whey & Tamarack is a fourteen cow grazing dairy outside Viroqua, Wisconsin, in the Driftless hills, run by Ruth Okonski and her son Abel, who came home from a cheese cave in Vermont. They make one cheese from morning milk only: a raw milk tomme pressed into two kilogram wheels, then aged nine months on spruce boards in a stone root cellar, where every wheel is turned and rubbed with brine by hand twice a week.
Who this theme is for
A small farm or creamery selling one aged food by mail: a cheese, a cured ham, a cask of miso, a fruitcake that sits for months. These buyers are paying for time, so the page opens on the cut wheel resting on its spruce board, comes in close on the golden paste and the rind, then shows hands rubbing a wheel in the cellar. Conscious keeps the type plain and the layout calm, which suits a farm that would rather talk about its cows than about itself.
What was decided in the brief
The style is Conscious on its second variant, because the deep pine green reads as pasture and the saffron accent is the colour of the paste, so the buttons match the cheese on the board. The brand facts lead with the single cheese and the fourteen cows, then the nine months on spruce, because age is what the price pays for, then the cheese paper, because buyers of raw milk cheese ask how it travels before they ask anything else.