The render.

Rendering tallow is one of the oldest cooking processes in human history. You take suet — the hard fat that surrounds the kidneys and loins of cattle — and you melt it slowly, separating the pure fat from connective tissue and water. What's left after several hours on low heat is liquid gold: clean, neutral-smelling tallow with a long shelf life and the lipid profile that makes it a body-care ingredient.

The way you render tallow shapes its quality more than most people understand. There are two main methods.

Dry rendering. The fat is heated in a vessel at relatively high temperatures, often with steam pressure. This is faster, industrial, and standardises the output. It also degrades some of the fat-soluble vitamins and can introduce a slight smoky note.

Wet rendering. The fat is heated in water at a lower temperature, then separated. This is slower, more traditional, and preserves more of the vitamin A, D, E, and K content. The output has a more neutral scent and a cleaner mouthfeel (which doesn't matter for skincare but is a tell that the lipids are intact).

Sunnbalm uses wet-rendered tallow. Our supplier renders in small batches — between 50 and 200 pounds at a time — over several hours at a temperature low enough to never break the fatty acid bonds. The result is a soft, off-white tallow with a barely-there scent. We test each shipment for free fatty acid percentage (which indicates how oxidised the fat is — lower is better), peroxide value (also an oxidation marker), and microbial contamination.

The tallow arrives at our Minnesota facility in five-gallon food-grade buckets. We portion it into batch quantities, melt it in a temperature-controlled bath to roughly 70°C, then begin folding in the other three ingredients in order: beeswax first (which needs the highest melt point and dissolves first), then zinc oxide (which suspends evenly in the warm lipid matrix), then cocoa (which goes in last because cocoa darkens with prolonged heat).

The mixture is hand-stirred — not whipped, not emulsified with shear force — until visibly homogeneous. We pour it into the tins while it's still warm, lid them, and let them cool slowly. Cooling slowly matters: it lets the fat crystallise into a stable structure rather than the chunky, grainy texture you get from snap-cooling. A grainy balm isn't unsafe, but it's a worse product.

Each tin is finished with a hand-applied label and a small batch code that tells us, when a customer writes in, exactly which batch their jar came from. We've done about thirty production batches at the time of writing. We expect to do many more before we change anything about the process.