Lake Erie Creamery
Cherry Lane Farms
Grim Dairy
Lake Erie Creamery
Lake Erie Creamery is a small urban creamery in the city of Cleveland specializing in making artisan goat and cow milk cheeses. Begun by husband and wife Jerry Onken and Mariann Janosko in 2006, the creamery was purchased by Brian Moran in January 2013. Brian is intent on sustaining the heritage of quality artisan products that Lake Erie Creamery customers have come to expect and enjoy.
All our cheeses are made by hand. For our fresh cheeses, we gently pasteurize each batch to preserve the milk's quality and character. Great care is also taken with our raw milk products, making those cheeses the very same day we pick up our milk from the dairy. There is no substitute for freshness.
We proudly serve many local restaurants and our cheeses are available at numerous retail outlets in the Cleveland area.
About the Owner
Brian Moran has run his own fine gardening business, Kinetic Gardens, since 2000. Instead of doing snow removal, as many seasonal companies do in the winter, Brian chose to find work at Cleveland's historical West Side Market. It was here that he made many contacts in Cleveland's vibrant food community and where he discovered a passion for cheese. One particularly snowy morning a few winters back, the idea of becoming an artisan cheesmaker came to him. He realized that he could take the creative, meticulous and watchful elements of gardening and focus them into a different living and blooming organism. Cheese.
Each week, Brian hauls milk in 10-gallon stainless steel cans from Cherry Lane Farm, a family operation in Portage County, Ohio.
Teddy, our farmer, milks about 120 of her 400 registered Saanen goats twice a day to produce the high quality milk that lets us make great cheese year round.
We also haul milk from Grim Dairy in New London, Ohio from March through December.
Eric Grim, his wife Barb and their family milk about 100 Guernsey and Jersey cows 2 to 3 times a day. The Grims converted to grazing in 1992 and are avid proponents of this sustainable practice. They are able to feed their herd on half the acreage of a traditional grain-based dairy and what the cows eat in the pasture gets put back into the pasture as fertilizer. Not only is this a sound practice for the dairy, it also produces beautiful milk that we are fortunate to use in our cheeses and other cow milk products.
“We have always wanted to be farmers. As artisan cheese makers, we feel that we are at last a part of the farming community - the link between the gifts of the land and the joys of the table.”
