Today we’d like to introduce you to Alyse Lewis
Hi Alyse, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
So I was born and raised in Southern California and California is all I’ve ever known. After my 2nd child was born and I learned more and more about having a slower pace of life and being more self-sustaining, I knew California was going to be tough to live that kind of lifestyle. My first born was sensitive to about everything on his skin and we struggled with keeping his skin clear and away from harsh chemicals and inflammatory foods. This led a drive for me to lead a healthier lifestyle and know about ingredients in skincare and foods. So you can understand why a more self-sustaining lifestyle benefited us all. My husband was born and raised in Southern Ohio and as he loved his childhood upbringing, we decided to up and move to Jackson, Ohio (sight unseen) to start a new lifestyle all our own. We wanted to have a garden, farm animals and all things self sustaining so we could know where our food was coming from and know we were providing the healthiest and cleanest food possible for our children. We moved to Ohio in October of 2021 and our first winter, we learned that my son’s skin was much more irritated in the dry climate that we had ever experienced before. We had subscribed to a homesteaders magazine and on the front of the issue was how to render your own tallow. Tallow was something that we began to learn about for cooking and frying our foods which replaced our vegetable oils, but had not known about tallow for skincare. When I decided to make my own tallow, based off instructions from this article, it yielded so much that I sought other uses and one of them being for dry skin. After one application of beef tallow on my son’s skin, his eczema cleared up and healed overnight. I was in disbelief! Since this was winter time, I had turned the remainder of my tallow into balms and shared them as Christmas gifts with friends and family and really anyone that would listen to me about tallow. When people began telling their friends of friends, I had unintentionally started a small business and named it Butter Hide as tallow can smell like butter, cooks similar to butter, makes your skin feel as soft as butter and played on the word hide thats like cowhide and our own skin.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The challenging part about making tallow yourself is that tallow can have a very inconsistent consistency. Tallow is rendered beef fat from a hooved animal and in my case, a cow. And every cow is different which leads to different textures and densities of tallow once rendered. Not only are the cows different, the seasons change which comes along with diet changing the consistency of the fat. So every time I rendered, I was changing formulations and adapting to new types of tallow to make a consistent product for my customers. What has helped me get more consistent is rendering tallow from the same ranchers as much as I can so I have an idea what I’m getting small batch to small batch.
Another obstacle was changing from grassfed tallow to 100% grassfed and finished tallow. When I learned the cleanest, most nutrient dense tallow come from cows who are 100% grassfed their entire lives, I knew this is all I wanted to use in my products. This was a challenge for me because it is harder to find farms that believe in this practice locally and the cows are not fatty which means the yield of fat from each cow is low, giving me a hard time to keep up with production and demand of products. With a little travel (2-3hour radius) from Jackson, Ohio, I was able to source from farms that have a larger herds and are able to supply more fat at a time.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
So there have been a lot of new tallow makers on the market in the last few years. Word has gotten out that tallow is an amazing option for skincare. Unfortunately for some, they aren’t located in parts of the country with access to farms with as nutrient rich soil and pasture like Ohio does, So they source pre-rendered tallow from the internet and just melt down tallow that is mass made somewhere else, often from feed lot cattle. When you do this, you don’t know about the cows or practices used to raise the cow and leaves a lot of questions as a consumer on the quality of the tallow. Luckily for me, moving to an area with lots of farmers and great farmland, I am able to selectively work with farmers one on one and know their practices from start to finish from birth to table of their livestock and herds. As far as I know Butter Hide is the only tallow based skincare option in our area rendering 100% grass fed and finished tallow, in small batches, with the safest temperatures because i want the best of the best for my family and community.
What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
The most wonderful thing about this area is the people. When you meet someone new, you know it’s a genuine how are you and people want to get to know you and will actually remember what you had said the next time you see them again. A grocery store is always filled with smiles and gentle passes, its refreshing to know people care and will help a stranger in need first chance they get.
The least thing i like about the city is that theres a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Its hard to break new ground with new ideas sometimes
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.butterhide.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/butterhide?igsh=cW91dTNkdDhzMXYy&utm_source=
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/butterhidetallow
