Deep in Amish country, women in white hats and aprons churn out Pepe Saya butter

This story is part of the November 30 edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

In a small room chilled to 12 degrees, three women wearing black aprons over ankle-length dresses, their hair pinned up under white cloth caps, are listening intently to a man wearing his own white cap. Behind them, a window frames a canopy of vivid autumn leaves, a sea of golds and reds falling on lush green farmland like a landscape painting. Cornfields and rust-coloured barns, the type you see in American children’s books and movies, are scattered throughout the surrounding countryside.

In what they call the “butter room”, the man delicately drops creamy balls of freshly churned butter into glass jars before smothering them in maple syrup. “You want to top it up and put the lid on really tight,” he says. “You all need to take this home! You all need to tell me what you think – have pancakes for breakfast!”

As the young women quietly take over packing the butter, a lamp hanging from a hook in the ceiling ­begins to flicker. The battery that powers the light is about to die. There’s no electricity here – the machines that churn the two tonnes of butter that are packed by hand in this room each week are powered by diesel generators and air compressors.

That’s because this is Amish country, in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, where horse-drawn buggies still traverse the picturesque country roads and followers of this Christian religion dating back to the 16th century try to avoid the technological trappings of modern life. Strictly speaking, that means no smartphones, no internet, no television, no credit cards, no driving a car – and no electricity.

Not exactly conducive to running a business in 2024, but this is where Australian producer, Pierre Issa – the man in the white cap everyone calls Pepe – has chosen to make his Pepe Saya cultured butter for the US ­market. He oozes positivity and enthusiasm as he teaches his chief butter maker and three young ­assistants how to make maple butter on a recent Wednesday morning. But Issa wasn’t always on board with the idea of partnering with this community, whose religion asks them to keep themselves separate from mainstream society.

Pierre (“Pepe”) Issa, co-owner of Pepe Saya, in white, oversees Amish workers packing freshly churned butter.Credit: Rob Locke

Eighteen months ago, all Issa knew about the Amish came from the 1985 movie, Witness, where Harrison Ford plays a detective protecting an Amish woman and her son in Lancaster County after the boy sees a ­murder. He thought they may have been a religious cult. “I didn’t really know anything about them,” he says, “then I Googled them.”

What he discovered gave him pause. But his ­curiosity was piqued enough to want to know more, to find out whether traditional Amish techniques could be a good fit with his commitment to making hand-made products with locally sourced ingredients. And so began a journey from Sydney to Lancaster County, and the start of a relationship that crosses cultures and blends the modern with the traditional, all churned into butter.

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The story of how a Sydney butter maker came to be working with an Amish community more than 15,000 kilometres away all started with a message scrawled on a blackboard. It was June 2023, and Issa’s wife Melissa Altman, the co-founder and CEO of their company, was running a stall at a trade fair in New York. The couple had begun selling their first wheels of cultured, hand-packed butter at Sydney’s Carriageworks Farmers’ Market in 2010, before ­expanding into retail stores and high-end restaurants such as Sydney’s Rockpool Bar and Grill. Qantas was another early customer. In 2020, they started exporting to countries including Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, the Maldives and the US.

But they soon realised that shipping butter from Australia to North America would not be sustainable, due to freight costs. It also didn’t fit with their philosophy – they’d decided that where there were cows, they wanted to make their butter locally. So, on the first day of the New York trade show, Altman wrote a ­message on a blackboard that read: “We are looking for a dairy partner and a distributor.”

The following afternoon, a man dressed in a black hat, black waistcoat and white shirt approached, ­introducing himself as “Brother Daniel” from Lancaster County. He explained how he helped Amish farmers get their milk to market.

As a member of the Mennonite Church, a group that split from the Amish more than 300 years ago, Brother Daniel follows a more liberal interpretation of the Anabaptist religion. He drives a car, and uses a mobile phone and the internet, making it much easier for him to communicate with customers. (He only wants to use his first name in print. Being humble is a key tenet of his religion, he says, and he worries about appearing “prideful”.)

When Brother Daniel read Altman’s sign, he sensed an opportunity. “I said, ‘We got cows, and if you need more cows, you call a cousin, a brother, and say you need this many cows and you got it.’ ” Brother Daniel was serious. “I told her, ‘Give me your address. I’ll have a tanker full of 6000 gallons [nearly 23,000 litres] of milk ready for you next week.’ She said, ‘Wait! Don’t send us milk yet. We’re not ready.’ ” When Altman explained Pepe Saya was looking for someone in the US who could make butter according to its recipe, Brother Daniel had an ­answer for that, too. “I said, ’We’ve been making ­butter for 300 years in Pennsylvania. Let us make the butter right on the farm.”

As he explained the Amish’s traditional methods, Altman was impressed. They exchanged details, and when she returned home to Sydney’s Newtown, where the couple live with their two teenage sons, she told Issa to call Brother Daniel. But he didn’t share her ­enthusiasm. “I said, ‘That sounds really difficult,’ ” he recalls. Altman was insistent. “I’m telling you,” she told her husband, “these are our guys.”

Brother Daniel, who introduced Issa to the Amish, and his bees.Credit: Rob Locke

When Issa got around to phoning Brother Daniel a couple of weeks later, their conversation lasted two hours. Brother Daniel explained how the Amish used a few basic machines to churn the butter and did the rest by hand. Dozens of phone calls followed, in which Issa was ­introduced to Amish farmers and butter ­makers. He wanted to show them his Sydney factory, to give them a better idea of how he made cultured butter, but there was a problem: “They can’t fly,” said Brother Daniel. “But I can.”

In October last year, he visited Issa’s Caringbah ­factory and was surprised to see people packing butter by hand. A couple of weeks later, it was Issa’s turn to board a plane and head to Lancaster County to see an Amish farm and creamery for himself.

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When the Amish began migrating to the US in the 18th century, fleeing persecution in Europe, Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County is where they put down roots. There are now about 390,000 Amish people across the US, but the Lancaster community remains the country’s largest.

It’s only a three-hour train ride from New York City but scenes reminiscent of an earlier era are telltale signs we’re in Amish country. A team of ­horses hauling a plough across a paddock. One-room school houses set back from the road. Horses clomping down roads that thread through fertile farmland, pulling buggies carrying women in black bonnets and bearded men wearing straw hats.

It’s October this year, and as Issa drives up a dirt road to Gap View Farm, a large barn perched on the hill comes into view. Small ­children run out the front door of the nearby house, grasping cookies as they dash to a sandpit. A horse is hooked up to a buggy parked outside. A girl wearing a white cap and long dress is up a ladder, putting a fresh coat of paint on the barn that houses horses, pigs, chickens and a dairy.

As late afternoon sunlight pours through the ­entrance to the dairy, Jersey and Holstein Friesian cows trot in calmly. Wearing braces to hold up his ­trousers, a seven-year-old boy called Ivan sweeps hay in front of them and they start chewing. His 11-year-old sister, Sarah, wipes the cows’ teats with a cloth before their father, Mervin King, attaches stainless steel cups and the milk starts flowing.

Mervin King, left, and some of his children with Issa on his dairy farm.Credit: Rob Locke

King is one of 11 Amish farmers who supply milk for Pepe Saya butter. He grew up milking cows by hand, but started using milking equipment about 15 years ago. In between speaking to his children in Pennsylvania Dutch, a language derived from German dialects that developed in the US, and tending to his 45 ­cattle, King explains how he and his wife Sadie run their 45-hectare farm and raise their 14 children ­according to Amish customs.

They walk their cattle into the dairy every morning at 5.30 and again at 5.30 in the afternoon. An air ­compressor powers the milking equipment attached to the cow’s teats, pumping the milk into silver cans. The milk is poured into a tank kept cool by a diesel generator. The generator also powers a refrigerator in the small farm-gate store beside the dairy, where members of the public come to buy raw milk.

When night falls, the family uses lights run on ­batteries charged by solar power and propane lamps. “We choose to not be modern,” says King. “Electricity is a major part of modern technology, so we really work hard to make sure we don’t start slipping it into our lives here and there.”

His children don’t start learning English until they start walking down the hill through the paddock to the one-room school. Sunday is a day of rest, after morning milking. Local families take turns hosting church in their homes every second week.

King only travels in a car if he has to travel long ­distances, when he usually gets a ride with Brother Daniel. Otherwise, the 50-year-old hooks his horse up to the buggy and climbs in. His three oldest children have married and moved out of the family home, but all live within “trotting distance”.

‘They may live like that because of their religion but it’s very sustainable. Their footprint is much less than ours.’

Pierre Issa

“We need a more slow-paced way of life,” says King, who bought his property 26 years ago after growing up on his parents’ farm next door. “It just seems history tells us once you start using a car, you lose some of the old morals, the old traditions … It’s just like electricity, one thing leads to another. But it’s not just that. We choose to use a horse and buggy because it makes us slow down. It helps keep us who we are.”

King has always sold his milk to local businesses and members of the public who come to his farm-gate shop. In the past, he’s avoided going into business with people from outside his community, whom he refers to as “the English”. “We choose to keep ourselves apart from the English,” he says. “A lot of people come to us and say they want to work with our community, but that’s why we have to be careful, because too many times they just want to come and take from the community.”

King is one of 11 Amish farmers who supply milk for Pepe Saya butter.Credit: Rob Locke

But when Brother Daniel asked if he could bring an Australian butter maker to see his farm, King agreed – Brother Daniel had handled the distribution side of their business for years and he trusted him. Then, he says, “we prayed on it”.

When Issa arrived on King’s farm in late October last year, he was impressed by what he saw – cattle that were mostly grass-fed (along with some lucerne hay and corn stalks) and well cared for. “The fact that they’re grass-fed gives me a yellow butter, which is what we want,” he says. He found that King used no pesticides and limited his use of power. “They may live like that because of their religion but it’s very sustainable. Their footprint is much less than ours,” he says.

His fascination with their decision to forgo electricity came from personal experience. Born in Lebanon in 1976, Issa moved to Australia with his family when he was three months old. (Pepe is the nickname his Lebanese-Australian father came up with, thinking it would be easier for Australians to pronounce.) Six years later, he returned to Lebanon with his father while his mother, an Australian of Scottish heritage, stayed in Sydney. During the 10 years he lived in Lebanon, the country was in the throes of a violent civil war and his ­family would often only have power from a generator a few hours a day. “The ­difference is, in Lebanon it wasn’t a choice. Here, these people choose this,” Issa says, referring to the Amish. “It’s a big sacrifice when something’s right in front of you.”

On the first trip to Lancaster County, Brother Daniel introduced Issa, who was raised Maronite Catholic, to an Amish butter maker, Daniel Lapp. Local farmers have always made their own butter, but inoculating pasteurised cream with live cultures to make crème fraîche and then churning it to make cultured butter was a new concept.

Amish butter maker Daniel Lapp, who grew up watching his mother make butter on their farm. “We always had homemade butter on the table but there was no fermenting, no culture added, nothing like that.” Credit: Rob Locke

Before meeting Issa, Lapp had worked as a butter maker for five years, and grew up watching his mother make butter on their farm. “We always had homemade butter on the table but there was no fermenting, no culture added, nothing like that,” says the 29-year-old father of four.

But soon after they met, Lapp and Issa were in the butter room at the creamery owned by Brother Daniel and King, along with about a dozen other members of the community. “Everyone from all the families came and we made butter together,” Issa says. “That was when I was convinced this was going to work. I knew it was going to be a mammoth undertaking but I knew I had to do it.”

First, however, he had to present his case to the Amish elders. “They want to see your intentions,” Issa says. In addition to buying milk from Amish farmers, there would be jobs making and packing the butter, and Brother Daniel and King would have a 50 per cent stake in the US operation.

One of the elders involved in that initial meeting says they agreed to Issa’s plan because they wanted to keep their community together on Amish land. The 77-year-old – who did not want to be named because, like Brother Daniel, he was worried that putting his name in print could be considered a sign of pride – said young people sometimes had to find jobs outside the community. “I thought it sounded good if it keeps people working and gives them the incentive to work together,” he says.

Having secured the elders’ blessing, Issa got a US distributor on board and it was full steam ahead for the Pepe Saya Amish Collection. In February this year, he returned to Lancaster County and spent the next four months teaching Lapp and his assistant, Sadie Stoltzfoos, how to make his cultured butter. “It took a few goes for us to get it right but in hindsight, they picked it up as good as anyone I’ve ever worked with,” Issa says. “The consistency of what they produce is extremely high and they don’t cut corners.”

Sadie Stoltzfoos prepares a butter sheet for a New York bakery. The tin was welded by an Amish tinsmith.Credit: Rob Locke

Their first batch was sold on King’s farm in April. Then the distributor started sending it to restaurants and retailers across the US. “We have sold our ­fresh-made products on our farm for decades. But this was different,” says King. “We made this together with Pepe, to be sold all over the country … I just shake my head and say I still can’t believe it.”

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It’s a crisp October morning when Issa returns to Lancaster County to see how things are going. Despite having only arrived from Australia the night before, and not having slept much, he buzzes around the butter room, energetically explaining to the staff how to make maple butter, the latest product they’re planning to launch in the US. In Australia, they use Canadian maple syrup, but in Pennsylvania they’re sourcing maple from an Amish farmer. “We keep it in the ­family,” says Brother Daniel. “We’ve got dozens of ­families now that are benefiting from this.”

Issa’s energy and unrestrained enthusiasm for ­everything butter-related contrasts with the three quiet, reserved young women working here. As they sit at a table just outside the butter room, cutting foil into squares to wrap butter, Stoltzfoos ­explains how, once a week, a van picks them up from their family farms early in the morning and drives them to the creamery. Brother Daniel arranged the van, driven by a non-Amish driver, because travelling to the creamery by buggy would take too long, he explains.

Lapp and Issa in the butter room. The Amish elders agreed to make butter with Issa in part as a way to keep their young employed and in the community.Credit: Rob Locke

Before starting work here in March, Stoltzfoos, 29, spent most days working on her family’s farm. “It’s great, it’s good for something different,” she says of working at the creamery. “I just do one day [a week]. I don’t have time for more than that. I take care of [the family’s] chickens.”

Stoltzfoos, one of 18 young women from around the district who work here, says she ­finished school at 14. Amish children typically attend school until they ­finish eighth grade, according to Professor Steven Nolt, director of the Young Centre for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County. After that, he says, they are considered “vocational students” and go to school half a day a week until they turn 14. Girls then often work on family farms or in small shops, while boys might learn a trade like ­woodworking, metalworking or construction, while also farming. A fascination with the traditional Amish lifestyle has spawned a growing tourism industry in Lancaster County, where visitors can buy Amish-made wooden furniture and farm produce.

Maple butter is one of the company’s diversified range of products.Credit: Rob Locke

It’s up to young adults to choose to be baptised into the Amish church. About 85 per cent of children born to Amish parents opt to join the church, usually between the ages of 17 and 21, making it “a high ­retention rate as compared with many other religious traditions”, Nolt says.

The young women working in the creamery are not very ­talkative but Stoltzfoos seems quietly determined as Issa shows her how to make a butter sheet for a New York bakery that wants to make croissants with them. She presses the ­butter into a rectangular frame that was welded by an Amish tinsmith just that ­morning. Issa says it’s how he used to make butter sheets in Sydney before moving to a semi-automated machine. (Only one other product – the individual 15‑gram serving – is made by machine in Sydney.)

Issa says the cost of labour and raw materials in his US operation would be equivalent to costs in Australia, if there were no difference in the dollar. “There’s no ­savings in labour,” he says. “What you get is what no one else is willing to do, which is make things by hand.”

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The pursuit of a slower, simpler life may shape the daily routines of many Amish followers, but the level of adherence to traditional customs varies across communities. Some Amish have begun using technology most of us consider indispensable, such as mobile phones.

‘I’m used to “Let’s do this” and you just do it. With the Amish, it’s not like that. Their whole mindset is to slow down. I’ve had to learn to work at their pace.’

Pierre Issa

Such modern accoutrements are not for King. He keeps a landline in an office about 100 metres away from his house, but only checks the answering machine twice a day. Under Old Order Amish customs, phone lines are permitted, but phones should not be kept in the house. King has no internet connection, but Issa has found a way to reach him via email, albeit a rather convoluted one. Issa sends an email to an account monitored by staff at an office store in the town near King’s farm. They print the email and fax it to King, whose fax machine runs off solar-powered batteries. He faxes his handwritten reply back to the office staff, who scan and email it back to Issa. The whole process can take a week.

Patience, Issa says, has been key to forging this ­partnership. “It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “I’m used to ‘Let’s do this’ and you just do it. With the Amish, it’s not like that. A lot of preparation goes into anything you do. Their whole mindset is to slow down. I’ve had to learn to work at their pace for this project.“

King acknowledges that some Amish customs create challenges. But when I ask whether he’d ever be ­tempted to buy a computer and connect to the internet now that he’s cemented his relationship with a butter maker who lives on the other side of the world, he’s ­adamant. “I won’t be able to do that,” he says solemnly. “We don’t want any part of that.” Does he ever worry his kids might want to leave the community and ­partake in what the 21st century has to offer? “That’s something we don’t talk about,” he says. “We just hope they will stay with our traditions.”

King is planning for his eldest son to take over the running of the farm, and is building an extension onto his house for him to live in with his wife and baby. He ­believes his ­family can hold onto their faith and customs while doing
business in the modern world. “That’s the main thing in this day and age,” he says, “to keep the family working together, playing together and praying together.”

Mervin King’s farm. He’s adamant he won’t be tempted by computers, TVs, flights and the like just because he’s making butter with a Sydneysider. “I won’t be able to do that,” he says solemnly.Credit: Rob Locke

As Issa catches up with King, staff at the creamery and elders, it’s clear he’s still curious about the Amish way of life. He asks questions about everything from farming to their families, and the Amish seem to have welcomed in this “English” outsider.

After a day spent driving around Lancaster County, Issa says we’re going for dinner at the home of King’s brother-in-law, David Schmucker. We watch Schmucker milk his two cows by hand as the light fades and a full moon rises behind his barn, before heading inside to meet his wife Anna and sit at the table with their four children. We bow our heads for a minute’s silent prayer, then Anna serves roast beef, mashed potatoes, peas and freshly baked
sourdough rolls, along with Issa’s butter, of course. The lights over their dining table are run by battery. Candles light the bathroom. No phones interrupt the meal, and there’s no television humming in the background.

The mood is relaxed and jovial as Issa catches up on the family’s news and they ask about his wife and ­teenage sons back in Sydney. When I ask Schmucker how he is connected to the creamery, it turns out he’s not involved at all – he and Issa became friends after King introduced them.

A few days later, Issa has left behind the slower pace of Lancaster County for the bustle and noise of New York City. With his white hat and apron back on, he’s in a Brooklyn warehouse, slathering thick smears of butter onto slices of baguette, and handing them out to retailers and buyers from various parts of the country at a trade show. He’s nearing the end of his two-week US trip, but his energy levels don’t seem to be ­flagging. He chats animatedly to a French charcuterie producer, who comes over for a taste test. “It’s ­unbelievable it’s made in America,” the Frenchman gushes. “It’s like the best in France.”

Pierre Issa and wife Melissa Altman, who came up with the idea of working with the Amish to make butter in the US. She had to convince him it was doable.Credit: James Brickwood

Issa looks pleased but quickly points out he’s not looking for approval. “I’m gauging where my flavour palate is versus where he’s at. France, at the end of the day, is the mecca for butter, right?”

The next day, Issa is off to deliver samples to the New York bakery that wants to trial the Amish-made butter in their croissants. It later puts in an order for 250 kilograms of butter a week.

It’s just over a year since Issa made his first trip to Lancaster County, but the Amish-made butter is now sold to 250 retailers and restaurants in 23 states. Pepe Saya USA has diversified its offerings, adding new Amish products, like honey, to its online store. A chocolate shop that first opened its doors 149 years ago in the quaint city of Lancaster recently started making Pepe Saya caramels, another product Issa sells in Australia.

“We’ve started from zero and we’ve had to build it up,” says Issa, who’ll return to Lancaster County in January. With orders increasing in the lead-up to Christmas, he expects the creamery will be churning out up to four tonnes of butter a week by the end of December, double what they were making in October.

But Issa insists he doesn’t want to expand too quickly. “The best way forward for us is to adapt to that idea of slow and steady,” he says. The Amish way of life, it seems, just might be rubbing off on him.

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