Homogenization is a mechanical trick, not a natural state. It works by forcing milk through a narrow valve at high pressure, breaking the fat globules down until they're too small to rise to the top on their own. The result is a bottle that looks the same from the first pour to the last — tidy, uniform, and, we'd argue, a little flatter in flavor for it.

Our milk isn't homogenized. Leave a bottle on the counter for an hour and a pale gold layer will settle at the top — the cream, rising the way it always has, the way it did in every bottle of milk before homogenization became standard practice in the twentieth century. It's the same cream line we skim for our Farmhouse Cream, and the same base we culture slowly for eighteen hours to make our Cultured Butter.

There's no wrong way to deal with it. Shake the bottle and it folds back in, giving you an evenly rich milk. Leave it and pour the cream off the top into your coffee, and you've got something closer to a light cream than standard milk. Either way, it's yours to decide — we'd rather hand you that choice than have a processing line make it for you before the bottle ever reaches your door.

It's a small thing, as far as dairy processing goes. But it's one of the clearest, most visible signs of everything else we don't do to this milk before it reaches you.