An unassuming place out in the boonies, but they do good work.
The day arrived at last! It’s not normal for me to get this excited over what amounts to groceries (okay, maybe it is), but today was the day we got our beef from Innisfree on the Stillwater! Six months after we bought our freezer for just such a purpose, and almost three weeks after we helped pick out our steer, we got the call from Kirby’s Butcher Shop that our “quarter” of beef was ready. In fairness to Kirby’s, the beef was ready awhile before we came to get it. But they had suffered a power outage, and when we had planned to go pick it up, they were disinclined to open their freezer and risk thawing out thousands of dollars worth of meat.
So on a beautiful day off from work, I loaded up the dog in the pickup truck, threw a few coolers in the bed, and made the drive out to Greenville. The shop itself is nothing to look at from the outside, and inside is all business too, with just a desk up front, full of the usual clutter of papers and aged office supplies that seems to characterize these sorts of small, rural businesses. The rest of the building is the butchery and freezers.
That is a pile o’ protein!
But whatever they lack in curb appeal, they make up for in expertise, professionalism and customer service. When the steer came in, I gave them a call, and the owner of the shop talked me through the process, since it was our first time ordering beef wholesale. We went cut by cut, him asking me what I wanted and didn’t, and what sizes, thicknesses and denominations to package for each. The result is a completely customized beef order, with all the cuts I want and none I didn’t, in packages sized perfectly for Katie and I to use as we need.
Picking up was just as nice. I showed up, having already paid Innisfree for my share of the steer, and they just brought up the trays with my beef, I loaded them into my coolers, and was on my way. Each portion is clearly stamped with the cut, quantity and our name, for easy sorting and tracking later. In all, our quarter ended up being right about 100 pounds of beef, and this from a steer that lived through some lean times, in terms of rainfall and resulting pasture density. The meat itself is lean, healthy and so incredibly tasteful, you might not even recognize it as beef, if all you’ve ever had is store-bought, grain-fed, factory farm beef. It’s great stuff! Now we’ll have to see how long 100 lbs of beef can last two athletes.