After 12 months of development, Whitestone and Mr Brown have released three artisan butters - manuka-smoked, salted and unsalted.
All are freshly churned in small individual batches from North Otago cream, using the same cultures Whitestone uses to make its award-winning cheeses.
Whitestone Cheese's Simon Berry yesterday described the result as ''indulgent, with a smooth luxurious texture and a full-cream flavour''.
''It is butter that looks and tastes as butter should.''
He was delighted with the result, in which North Otago cream, cultures and traditional batch butter-making techniques combined to produce a New Zealand-style premium butter to be proud of, Mr Berry said.
Mr Brown had questioned why, living in a country where dairy farming was a backbone of the economy, people ate inferior butter.
''If we can make world-class milk products, magnificent cheeses, then why, oh why, can't we make pure unadulterated creamy cultured butter?'' Mr Brown said.
After talking to some large manufacturers in the industry, which did not seem particularly enthused, he met Whitestone cheese company's Bob and Simon Berry and a collaboration began.
For the past 12 months they worked on getting the flavour profiles and texture right, balancing just the right amount of culture to give the butter a distinctive flavour, without losing any of the pure, rich taste of North Otago cream.
The butter was launched yesterday jointly by Mr Brown, at his Auckland restaurant, and Simon Berry and would be distributed through selected supermarkets this week.
