Those who don’t sell it for animal feed often have to pay to have it removed.
Not at Harvey Cheese. The South West cheesemakers are turning that waste – about 90 percent of the milk processed – into another specialty. Homegrown spirits.
With the same artisanal approach as its sister, St Duke’s Distillery crafts a range of small-batch gins, vodkas and liqueurs.
Pieter Lottering, who was in mining before his family bought the Harvey-based businesses two years ago, says St Duke’s is one of only two such producers in the country.
“When we took over the distillery was very new, so we’ve just continued to build that up – if we can get the factory to full production, we will have almost no waste product,” he says.
Building relationships
It’s the kind of value adding that Pieter believes is so important for the dairy industry in general.
“Our factory has a fair bit of capacity, so we do all sorts of collaborations with farmers to help add value to their product,” he says.
“The previous owners made a beautiful Pont Leveque cheese for our neighbours, Halls Dairy, and we’ve expanded that to a camembert. We’re also talking to a goat farmer who is struggling to get a cheese premises up and running. We’ve got a blueprint for relationships that work.”
That includes a more recent relationship with Quindanning Buffalo’s Graeme Carthy, WA’s only buffalo farmer.
“Buffaloes don’t process beta carotene so it’s a very white milk with about double the cream content and much higher protein,” Pieter says. “It’s also a bit sweeter, so it’s a really lovely milk.”
Buffalo beauties
Harvey Cheese has helped bottle small runs of buffalo milk to test the market – you might find it at Fresh Provisions, if you’re lucky – as well as turn some of the white stuff into cheese, including a brie, blue cheese and fetta. Pieter hopes the Buffalo Baron, a Wensleydale-style hard cheese, will also be out by the end of the year.
“We took them to the Mould Cheese Festivals in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth this year, which was the first real test, and people really loved them,” he says.
Pieter will also be bringing them to Meet the Buyer™, Buy West Eat Best’s annual food and beverage trade show, where he is hoping to persuade more retailers to hero WA cheese.
“We would also like to have conversations with restaurants and other food service operators about putting local cheese on their menus,” Pieter says. “We are competitively priced and our quality is much higher than imported cheese flooding the market.”
This belief in the quality of WA cheese is evident when you visit Harvey Cheese, where you will discover not just their award-winning creations but those from many other local producers, such as Halls Family Dairy, La Delizia Latticini and Brownes Dairy.
“We are really working hard to change the nature of the conversation in dairy manufacturing in Western Australia,” Pieter says.
Noting that the biggest risk smaller operators face is access to milk, he hopes that by paying a bit more to produce a premium product, they can empower farmers to focus on quality rather than bulk.
Stronger together
“We are not each other’s competition – we import so much cheese so there is huge value in us working together, allowing each other to own our niches, and uniting for our industry,” he says.
He praised the effectiveness of Buy West Eat Best labelling, with its distinctive bitemark logo, in informing consumers about the origin of their produce – something he would love to see applied to the alcohol market.
“Only about 5 percent of gin makers in Australia make their own alcohol – most buy ethanol from big alcohol manufacturing plants and they then do the flavourings,” Pieter says. “The average consumer doesn’t know that because there are no labelling laws to give them that knowledge.”
It is one of the things he will be sharing with visitors to the St Duke’s Distillery stall at Meet the Buyer™, alongside Harvey Cheese.
“It’s a great chance for a bit of exposure, just letting people know we exist,” Pieter says. “The wholesale business is very tight so we are really looking for a handful of prominent places that would like to work with us – one of our gins could be their house gin, for instance. It’s delicious.”
As those who tried the combination at the Mould Cheese Festival can attest, they are a perfect match for great cheese, too.
Meet the Buyer™ is at Crown Perth on Tuesday 21 October 2025. The exhibition floor is sold out, but chefs (and other buyers) still have time to snap up tickets to see what’s on offer.
Please note: Meet the Buyer™ is a trade and industry event only, but you can show your support by buying from the businesses mentioned and looking out for local produce wherever you shop.