Six Victorian Butters That’ll Make You Rethink The Supermarket Mainstays

There’s a reason good restaurants don’t serve home-brand butter with a bread plate. Pair quality butter with a thick slice of good sourdough or an airy dinner roll, and you get something greater than the sum of its parts.

These butters aren’t just a finishing touch, they’re the main event. Each one speaks to a broader shift in how we make and enjoy food: hyper-local, quality-focused, and crafted with care. And these boutique butters are not staying in their lane either. More producers are teaming up with like-minded makers, including Del Bocio’s recent chilli oil collab with Six Eyed Scorpion and Madeleine Butter’s team up with Maker & Monger. Whether you’re slathering it on toast or melting it into something more ambitious, these producers make butter a luxury worth savouring.

Lard Ass

With a name that doesn’t mess around, Lard Ass has a cult following for a reason. The brand was founded by Monica Cavarsan, who grew up on a dairy farm in Western Australia, in 2017. Cavarsan has a love of French cultured butter. Her Bellarine Peninsula-based company barrel-churns butter in single batches using imported European cultures. The brand’s cultured butters come salted and unsalted, as well as in rolls amped up with roasted fennel seeds, black garlic, miso and more.

Gippsland Jersey

Gippsland Jersey ’s cultured butter is made using milk from Jersey cows, prized for its creamier texture. The resulting butter has a high butterfat content of 86 per cent (Australian butter must have a minimum of 80 per cent butterfat) meaning it’s a decadent spread that’s as good on toast as it is melted over roasted veggies. But there’s more to the story.
The East Gippsland brand was founded by Steve Ronalds and Sallie Jones in 2016, during a sudden drop in the price of milk that had a profound effect on farmers. The business aims to ensure farmers are paid fairly and raises money for mental health support in the farming community.

Madeleine Butter

Madeleine ’s cultured butter is inspired by French techniques, but made in Lilydale using milk from grass-fed Jersey cows. The milk is fermented with live cultures and slowly churned before the resulting product is passed through a malaxer. The process kneads and presses freshly churned butter to remove excess buttermilk. Madeleine’s salted butter is finished with French grey sea salt and comes in a package that looks as beautiful as the butter tastes. Occasionally, the brand also has limited releases of butters flavoured with ingredients such as bush tomato, wattleseed and even Parmigiano Reggiano and pepper.

Del Bocia

Coburg North-based Del Bocia ’s butter is made using milk from grass-fed Victorian cows. Founder Alberto Borghi says he decided to make uncultured butter because the milk is rich and flavourful enough that it shines on its own. “Keeping it uncultured means the taste stays clean, sweet, and delicate – you really get to enjoy the natural character of the cream without the tanginess you’d typically find in cultured butter,” he says. Del Bocia butter is slow-churned using machines from the 1960s. The team then removes buttermilk by washing the butter with cold water, a method Borghi says is used in his native Italy. “It’s a slow and respectful process that preserves the natural aroma and texture of the butter, and it also makes it naturally lactose-free.”

Hand-wrapped and packaged to look more like chocolate bars than butter, it comes in multiple flavours: unsalted, finished with flakes of sea salt, infused with truffle and one with a real kick – butter with chilli oil from Six-Eyed Scorpion folded in.

St David Dairy

This boutique dairy in the heart of Fitzroy was founded by Ben Evans and is now run by fourth-generation dairy farmer Mancel Hickey. It's beloved for its milk and yoghurt, but the salted cultured butter arguably the real MVP. Made with cream from local farms and finished with pink salt from Mount Zero, it’s bright and well-balanced.

Schulz Organic Dairy

Schulz has been producing organic milk on its family-run Timboon farm for five decades. The dairy’s newest product, organic butter, is as simple as can be. There’s nothing but cream and salt. Plus, the box it comes in is recyclable and the butter wrap is compostable at home.