The best beef in southeastern wisconsin
At Lake Geneva Country Meats, we are known for having incredibly high quality beef. This reputation is no accident, we have worked hard to develop standards for the beef we buy to offer our customers. We’re so proud of what we offer, that we put our family name on the beef: Leahy’s Angus Beef.
Hands down, we think our Leahy’s Angus Beef is the best beef in the Lake Geneva area.
Watch this video to learn everything about how we source our beef and what sets Leahy’s Angus Beef apart from the beef offered elsewhere.
What Makes Leahy's Angus Beef Exceptional?
The quality of the beef you take home from Lake Geneva Country Meats comes down to two factors:
- Sourcing
- Workmanship
We take great care to make sure we are selecting animals that have been raised to produce quality meat for Leahy’s Angus Beef, then applying extremely high standards of workmanship to transform big hunks of meat into steaks, roasts, and more for you to enjoy.
Sourcing
We process about 18 beef animals almost every week right here at Lake Geneva Country Meats for local farmers. This meat all goes back to them or their customers to enjoy, and if you are interested in acquiring a quarter, half, or whole beef to enjoy at home, please get in touch with our custom processing team. We’ll get you on the path to taking home hyper-local beef.
For our retail case, we want to offer you the same high-level beef that we custom harvest and process in-house. To do this, we have picked a single source supplier for our beef and developed a set of quality standards for the beef we bring to our store.
This level of specificity is unusual, especially for a single store butcher shop, but we want to do everything we can to get the quality of beef we want to share with our customers.
Here’s what are the standards we’ve set for our sourcing program:
- Our beef is processed at one USDA-inspected family-owned facility in Omaha, Nebraska. This provides us with excellent traceability for quality and safety.
- All of the beef we purchase is Midwestern USA beef coming from one of these seven states:
- Iowa
- Illinois
- Minnesota
- Nebraska
- Kansas
- Missouri
- South Dakota
- We only offer Angus steers. No old dairy cows, no bulls. Just properly matured Angus steers.
- Farms that provide cattle for our Leahy’s Angus Beef program have undergone humane handling audits, and all of the processing of the cattle is done under USDA inspection for humane handling and food safety.
- Our animals are pasture-raised and grain-finished for tender and flavorful meat with exceptional marbling.
- We only purchase highly graded USDA choice cattle for our Leahy’s Angus Beef cattle. In addition to the high marbling score the cattle must achieve, we also have standards for the color of the beef, size of cuts like ribeyes, and more. These standards are verified by the USDA Agriculture Marketing Service to make sure we’re receiving quality beef animals.
- There are no additives in our meat such as brine or flavor enhancers, and all of the meat is guaranteed to be free of added growth hormones or medicines when the animal is harvested.
- We wet age all of our Leahy’s Angus Beef to achieve tenderness and a sweet, rich flavor.
Workmanship
Selecting quality beef is a big part of what makes our beef so special, but we still need talented butchers to cut the steaks, roasts, and more that you take home to cook.
Our team of butchers has an average level of experience of more than 15 years here at Lake Geneva Country Meats, and even more if you include their total careers. Our butchers work on our harvest floor, breaking animals, making sausage, and cutting for our retail store, so they know the whole picture of how beef gets on your table. This broad experience is hard to find elsewhere!
We trim more closely and leave less fat and gristle on our meat than many other places where you buy meat. We think it’s important to send clean, fresh meat home to you, and not pull any “butcher’s tricks” to get you to pay for meat you don’t want.
We’re proud of the standards of our butchery, and our customers agree!
What this all means
The most important thing for any butcher shop is that their customers enjoy the meat they take home. We can source the fanciest beef and cut it with the most skill, but if you don’t like it, it doesn’t mean a thing.
We think our meticulous sourcing and dedicated craftsmanship means you’re going to like the beef you buy from Lake Geneva Country Meats.
While each steak or roast will be a little different than the next one because every animal we source from is a little different, we are doing our best to make sure you’re getting consistently great beef.
Next time you’re in the mood for beef, take home our Leahy’s Angus Beef and enjoy a fantastic beef experience.
Do you have more questions? Here are more answers!
We want to be transparent and helpful when it comes to you knowing what you’re purchasing, especially with a premium product like beef.
Here are the answers to a few more questions we frequently receive!
The answer to this question comes back to the sourcing standards we follow and quality workmanship we provide.
Quite simply, it costs more to guarantee we are getting the standard of beef we want. We could buy “commodity” beef with looser standards, but we have found that the quality varies greatly. Most single shops buy on commodity, but we wanted to do better. There is a cost to that decision, but we want to do everything we can do to ensure you’re getting a great cut of beef.
Beyond our purchasing standards, our trimming standards means that we often have less meat to sell you compared to other places that sell meat.
For instance, if we buy a 5 pound PSMO tenderloin (an untrimmed tenderloin with silverskin on), we will only sell approximately 3 pounds of that meat after we trim the tenderloin to our standards. Other places may sell 4 pounds of meat.
You’ll pay less up front at the other place, but with our trimming, you won’t be throwing away meat at home!
Yes, we do!
We often offer USDA Prime Beef and Dry Aged beef as special items. Follow our weekly sales to see what’s available any given week.
Additionally, we’ll feature special beef like Japanese A5 Wagyu, Argentinian pampas-raised beef, and more as special items and bundles.
If you are looking for strictly grass-fed and grass-finished beef, we have that as well, as we featured Wisconsin Meadows Grass-fed and Grass-finished beef in our freezer section.
In the Midwest, we sit on one of the world’s great aquifers, and are blessed with fertile soil types. This combination produces grasses that provide abundant nutrition the cattle who graze on them giving their meat a perceptibly sweeter flavor.
There are terrific cattle producers throughout the rest of the county, but here in Lake Geneva, we want to focus on Midwestern cattle. It’s the taste we’re famous for!
In addition to the flavor differences, sourcing from our own region limits transport differences, which reduces cattle stress, resulting in better tasting meat, and reduces carbon emissions.
Of course we do.
We feature Wisconsin Meadows beef in our freezer section, and process beef for many Wisconsin farmers.
You may noticed that Wisconsin is not on the list of states we source our Leahy’s Angus Beef from, and here’s why:
Wisconsin is home to a many great beef cattle producers, but even more great dairy cattle producers. We could not find a source for a sufficient quantity of beef cattle for our needs. We do not want to sell dairy cattle as the meat is not up to our standards, particularly from a textural stand point.
If you are specifically looking for Wisconsin beef cattle, we can get you in touch with one of our Wisconsin based producers who uses our custom processing services!
There are many breeds of cattle that make great beef, and cattle with Angus genetics are some of the best.
Angus cattle are exceptional at putting on marbling (delicious intramuscular fat) which is something consumers love and a reason we love to sell it.
For ranchers, Angus cattle are relatively easier animals to raise with generally excellent temperaments and birthing characteristics. This means they are very popular with ranchers and readily available.
The combination of large herd size to guarantee theat we’ll be able to get the meat we need and quality of flavor means that we chose to stick of offering Angus beef!
Steers are castrated male bovines. Cows can be any bovine, but the term also can mean a female bovine that has had at least one calf.
Steers are castrated to avoid hostile bull behavior and to remove testosterone from the beef. The lack of testosterone also helps the meat become more tender, possess more marbling, and taste better.
Cow meat is safe to eat and makes for great mass-market burgers, but it generally has a softer texture that isn’t what we’re looking for in Leahy’s Angus Beef.
Do you have more questions that we didn’t answer? No sweat. Contact us using the form below, and we’ll be happy to answer your questions!
Our beef supplier is located in Omaha, Nebraska, at the nexus of America’s great Midwestern beef producing region.
Their location means that they are able to have a constant supply of quality cattle from just 7 states:
- Iowa
- Illinois
- Minnesota
- Nebraska
- Kansas
- Missouri
- South Dakota
These Midwestern states sit one of the world’s most amazing aquifers that produces incredible quality grasses. These grasses provide top-shelf nutrition to the beef cattle that graze on them, making the meat from these cattle taste sweet and delicious.
We don’t source meat from Canada, the Pacific Northwest, or the American Southeast. These regions are become more common sources for beef, and they do produce some fine quality beef. However, we prefer the taste and texture of the Midwestern beef we’re accustomed to, so we moved to ensure we’re only sourcing Midwestern beef!
For Leahy’s Angus Beef we only source Angus Cattle. While there are many good breeds of beef cattle, the Angus ranchers of the Midwest have gone above and beyond in offering a consistently superior level of quality in beef that we feel we can depend for our customers.
Angus cattle are among the best marbling animals – that means they easily develop tiny bits of intramuscular fat that melt when you cook a steak or roast, and that’s why we select Angus cattle for our store!
There are
Beef simply tastes better when it is All Natural. Leahy’s Angus Beef has no artificial ingredients or colors and is minimally processed.
We never add anything to our beef (except maybe a little Steak and Roast Rub when we’re cooking it!) and only select beef that meets the standards for all natural before it comes into our store.
Leahy’s Angus Beef is antibiotic and hormone free when it is in our case and on your dinner plate. Strict guidelines and testing from both the USDA and FDA ensure that no traces of antibiotics or hormones are in the meat, so you do not need to worry about consuming antibiotics or hormones in Leahy’s Angus Beef.
Additionally, the cattle we select for Leahy’s Angus Beef eat a vegetarian diet, not animal byproducts.
You want to know where your beef comes from and what it eats, and we’re happy to tell you.
Our cattle spend about 75% of their lives grazing on grasses and other forage plants in open pastures. After that, the animals used for beef production are moved to a separate area where diets are supplemented with grains such as wheat, barley, and corn for about four to six months.
They still have plenty of room to move about freely in this area. We feel this balanced diet results in the best tasting beef (not too stringy, not too fatty).
For the number of cattle we source for Leahy’s Angus Beef, we cannot buy all of our animals from ranchers in our immediate vicinity, but we purchase all of our animals from operations in the Midwest. Most of our animals come from Iowa where there are larger beef herds that meet our quality standards. The furthest away we source our animals from is Nebraska.
We believe buying as locally as possible and buying animals that are pasture raised and grain finished is the most environmentally responsible thing to do. Buying from the Midwest cuts down on transportation emissions, and cattle that are raised solely on grasses increase production energy usage by about 250% and take an additional 6 acres per animal to raise.
If America’s beef herd was all raised in this manner, we’d need an additional area about the size of Montana to raise them!
The beef industry is committed to humanely treating animals. It is simply the right thing to do.
In addition to being the right thing to do, humanely handled animals taste better as there are less bad tasting stress hormones in the meat. Lake Geneva Country Meats and all of our suppliers are constantly inspected by the USDA to ensure humane handling practices are followed during the harvesting process.
We believe that the Midwestern beef ranchers are also committed to humanely treating their animals. 98% of America’s beef herd comes from family farms and almost 80% of herds are under 50 animals in size.
The people raising our beef are family farmers who are dedicated to their animals and treat them with the utmost of care and respect.
