Standing at a meat counter or scrolling through a meat box site, you can't tell an animal's age, temperament or feed history by looking at it, and most of the time neither can the person serving you. That's not a knock on butchers or supermarket staff; it's just not information that travels with the beef.
We think it should. Because they dictate how well the beef will perform for you in the kitchen and on the plate.
So before anything goes in a box, we ask these nine questions of every animal, and we're happy to answer them for you.
Age has a real effect on tenderness, and it affects some muscles more than others.
As an animal gets older, its collagen becomes more heat-resistant, so the same cooking method that would tenderise a younger animal's connective tissue does less work on an older one, particularly in the high-collagen cuts used for braising.
The intermediate grilling cuts like the Rump, Denver, Bavette and Topside see the greatest reduction in customer satisfaction as source animals get older.
And at the meat counter, there's no way to tell whether you're looking at beef from a 14-month-old or a 14-year-old.
Breed matters more than most people realise.
Some cattle breeds are selected for eating quality; others are bred for growth rate or for coping with the harsh conditions of northern Australia.
Packaging rarely says which.
Muscle fibre type, fat composition, maturity pattern and a handful of other inherited traits all shift eating quality, and they shift with the breed, not just the animal.
Grass or grain: it's a simpler-sounding question than it is.
Grain feeding isn't the villain it's sometimes made out to be; the animals aren't mistreated, and there are legitimate reasons it's used.
What it does is change the composition and flavour of the fat. Grain-finished carcases also tend to be more consistently finished, which helps tenderness; grass-fed beef can match that, but only when the animal is well managed and well finished, and that's not always the case.
An animal's diet also changes the nutritional value of the beef, not just the flavour.
Grass-fed beef carries more omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E and beta-carotene than grain-finished beef and has a better omega-6 to omega-3 ratio.
It is also richer in pentadecanoic acid (C15) and margaric acid (C17), two fatty acids with a growing body of claimed health benefits.
Grass-fed beef also has two to three times more Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) than grain-fed beef. CLA has been shown to improve metabolic health in some studies.
You should care.
Unless you're eating A5 wagyu flown in from Japan, your beef was produced here in Australia, but Australia is a big, climatically varied place.
A 2009 Australian study found that animals of identical breeding produced better-quality beef when raised in a temperate climate than a sub-tropical one.
At the counter, there's no way to know which climate your beef came from, and in a lot of cases, the butcher doesn't know either, let alone the person at the supermarket deli.
We know where ours comes from, animal by animal.
Two things are at stake here: eating quality and welfare.
Long transport depletes muscle glycogen, and glycogen depletion is one of the biggest levers on eating quality there is.
In Australia there's also the risk of heat stress on the truck. Cattle recover fully from a long trip within about two weeks, but MSA rules require animals to be processed within 48 hours of leaving the farm, which doesn't leave room for that recovery to happen.
A stressed animal burns through glycogen and ATP stores which adversely effects eating quality.
This one's about eating quality and sustainability, not appearance.
A carcase needs to be well covered to protect the meat while it chills, as this prevents cold shortening, which destroys tenderness.
If a carcase chills too fast, the muscle fibres seize up and the resulting toughness never fully ages or cooks out.
But too much subcutaneous fat is wasteful: it takes six to seven times more energy to put down a kilo of fat than a kilo of lean muscle. The ideal fat depth is 8mm - 14mm; a lot of grass-fed carcases come in at only 3mm - 5mm, which greatly raises the cold-shortening risk.
Fat beyond 20mm, meanwhile, gets trimmed off and discarded: unpleasant to eat, and expensive to have produced in the first place.
7. Was it calm or stressed?
In our experience, temperament is one of the single biggest factors in eating quality.
Calm animals do better in the paddock: they spend more time eating and less time burning energy on stress, which means they put down more fat and are less prone to cold shortening.
They're also easier to handle and cope better with new experiences, which matters, because at some point every animal has to get on a truck.
Cooperative cattle travel better. They hold onto their muscle glycogen and ATP instead of burning through it. After slaughter, that glycogen converts to lactic acid, which tenderises the meat and drops its pH, exactly the condition the enzymes responsible for proper ageing need to do their job. ATP converts to Ribose, a key to a great Maillard reaction.
8. How long was the beef aged for?
We dry-age our beef as quarter carcases for 14 days.
That time lets natural enzymes tenderise the meat and lets moisture loss concentrate the flavour.
We also select for breeds with a high natural level of the enzymes that drive this process, which has a second benefit: more of the compounds that produce a better Maillard sear. More tender, more flavour.
Ageing isn't free. To paraphrase Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, “We’re gunna need a bigger fridge”.
A carcase hung for two weeks takes a lot of cool room space, loses 5% to 7% of its weight, plus extra trim on top of that, which is exactly why so much of the beef on sale hasn't been aged at all.
We think the result is worth the cost, and not just in the prized cuts. Every part of the carcase comes out with more depth and complexity, in everything you make with it.
9. Did it have HGPs?
Hormonal Growth Promotants (HGPs) speed up growth rates, and they're not always disclosed on the label.
As best we can tell, the scientific consensus is that properly used HGPs pose no appreciable health risk to humans. They've been banned in the EU since the 1980s regardless, largely for lack of research on their effects on young, developing people.
Our answer is simple: no.
It comes down to a trade-off between production efficiency and eating quality, and we're not interested in the trade.
HGPs increase muscle fibre size, which reduces tenderness; they reduce marbling; they suppress the post-mortem enzymatic ageing that builds flavour and tenderness; and they increase collagen cross-linking, which toughens the meat further.
A little more beef isn't worth it if it comes at the cost of the beef itself.
Experience exceptional beef for yourself.
100% grass-fed, 14-day dry aged, produced to the highest standards in North East Victorian.
