May 2024 Newsletter

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Landing in Burlington, the team started at Dedalus, a wine shop and market with an impressive cheese counter. While they stocked imported cheeses and cheeses from across the country, including Washington (shout out to Glacier Blue!), they did have a selection of artisanal cheeses from Vermont and the East Coast. Dedalus’ cheese counter is one that has inspired us as we plan our future brick-and-mortar store’s interior.

After talking shop with Dedalus’ mongers and checking out the local food truck scene, the group left Burlington for Greensboro, Vermont. They started at Lilith’s home, dining on a massive spread of cheeses from Jasper Hill Farm paired with local, in-season produce. The spread had been created by another award-winning cheesemonger, Alex Armstrong, also of Jasper Hill Farm. (You may remember Alex’s name from a previous newsletter, as he was the Team USA alternate for the Mondial du Meilleur fromager competition last year. He and Lilith both acted as team coaches for Courtney and Sam ahead of the competition.)  

This first taste of the Vermont cheese- and food-scape was cemented when the group got to their AirBnB for the evening: their hosts had stocked the refrigerator with local blueberries, yogurt, milk, and of course maple syrup. This visit was clearly a celebration of the regional food scene, as much as it was also a celebration of Vermont cheese.

The next day took them directly to Jasper Hill Farm. The tour started at the site of the original creamery, which shares space with one of the owners’ homes. Jasper Hill was founded in 2003 by two brothers, Matteo and Andy Kehler. The Kehlers were originally from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, but had spent their teen years living in Colombia. Returning to Vermont as young adults, they were depressed by the local economy and wanted to make a difference. Formerly an agricultural powerhouse, that part of Vermont was home to mass joblessness, widespread drug addiction, and farmland that lay fallow and overgrown.

Matteo and Andy decided to start a dairy farm and creamery in hopes of creating jobs and revitalizing their local economy. Working together with their wives, they started the creamery in the main house and experimented with making different types of cheeses. They would then reach out to chefs and cheese shops in New York and other nearby big cities, trying to sell their cheeses during a time when American artisanal cheese was just starting to get a name in the market.

The creamery got its lucky break in 2006. Another local creamery, the large cooperative Cabot, had reached out to Jasper Hill to collaborate on a product. Seeing how the artisanal cheese market was beginning to blossom, Cabot wanted to create a traditional clothbound Cheddar. Yet they couldn’t age that style of cheese in their facility, where they produced rindless blocks of Cheddar and weren’t equipped to deal with natural molds and yeasts growing on the outside of cheeses, which is customary with clothbound Cheddars. So they asked Jasper Hill to take the cheeses and age them for them. That batch of Cabot Clothbound Cheddar won Best of Show at the American Cheese Society Judging & Competition in 2006, cementing the two creameries’ partnership and really jump-starting the cheese scene in the Northeast Kingdom.

Matteo and Andy took their award to a bank and asked for a loan to build a larger facility on their farm: a system of five aging caves where they could age the Cabot Clothbound, their own cheeses, and cheeses for other farms in the region that didn’t have space for an aging facility. They got the loan, broke ground, and today both Jasper Hill Farm and the Cellars at Jasper Hill are a well-known name in the American cheese world.

Today, the original creamery has been transformed, and it only produces some of the cheeses Jasper Hill makes: the raw-milk cheeses. A subsequent investment in the farm recently allowed them to create a separate cheesemaking facility to produce their pasteurized, small-format cheeses. The creamery we visited makes Bayley Hazen Blue, one of the original Jasper Hill cheeses, award-winning Alpha Tolman (which was included in this month’s Cheese of the Month Club, and is now available to everyone!), and 2022 ACS Best of Show-winning Whitney, along with other R&D cheeses the creamery makes from raw cow and goat’s milks. In the winter, they make Winnimere there, too.

The new creamery produces everything that must be pasteurized due to being aged for less than 60 days: the famous bark-wrapped Harbison, bloomy-rinds Moses Sleeper and Little Hosmer, ash-ripened Sherry Gray, and washed-rind Eligo. Jasper Hill’s cheeses are named for places and historical figures in Vermont History, by the way.

All of the cheeses are aged in the five cellars, each one set to a specific level of humidity and temperature for optimum aging. A team of affineurs takes care of the cheeses, ushering them along during their aging period until they are deemed ready for sale. Jasper Hill is known for their emphasis on understanding science and microbiology, even as they pursue production of artisanal products. As they have grown in scale and the number of types and wheels of cheese produced, they have assembled a talented team that collaborates to make the best-tasting cheeses, understanding why they are good that way and how to get them there. The team does regular tastings to gain a deeper understanding of each cheese’s sensory qualities, and their labels are great because they suggest pairings for each cheese based on those qualities.

A creamery visit isn’t complete without a farm visit, so after spending time learning from the cheesemakers in the raw-milk creamery about their creation of native cultures on the farm (instead of using factory-produced cultures) and their pursuit of the ability to make rennet on their farm so that they can control the entire cheesemaking process and ensure their cheeses have a true Greensboro terroir, the group visited two farms. First they hung out with some goats at Bridgman Hill Farm; Bridgman Hill works with Jasper Hill, selling them their herd’s milk to be made into cheese. Across the U.S., artisanal cheesemakers who don’t produce their milk—or who don’t produce enough of their milk to make all the cheese they want—often create contracts with nearby dairy farms to secure high-quality milk for their cheesemaking operations.

Unlike the fluid milk market, which fluctuates like the stock market and rewards quantity over all else, cheesemakers pay a premium for milk that has specific fat and protein contents, that comes from happy and humanely treated animals, and that is produced in sanitary conditions with no cut corners that might incrase the risk of pathogens in the milk. Jasper Hill is one such creamery that pays to take a certain amount of milk from its neighboring farms. This is a win-win because the creamery gets the quality of milk they want, and the dairy farmers have a guaranteed income and home for their milk. Bridgman Hill is also making yogurt from their own milk, so it doesn’t all go to cheese. But their milk has allowed Jasper Hill to experiment and try mixed-milk and goat’s milk cheeses, which benefits us all.

After that, the group went to visit the Randi Albert Calderwood Cropping Center. While they have their own herd of cows grazing on some pastures, Jasper Hill Farm has other pastures that are not being grazed. Instead, those are used to grow grass that will become hay to feed the animals through the long, cold Vermont winter. Vermont has a short summer, so they try to grow as much hay as possible during that time, rushing out to harvest the grass when it’s reached the correct maturity and is dry enough to be collected. The farm built a special drying facility to dry the hay themselves, which actually saves them money because they don’t have to buy hay someone else or to pay someone to dry their hay for them. It also allows them to make sure the hay is really dry before the rains and snows set in; if the hay isn’t properly dry, it will ferment and become more like silage, a type of feed that has more bacterial activity and can create different flavors in the milk of cows who eat it.

The cropping and hay-drying operation is the first in a series of layers of on-farm steps that allow the Jasper Hill Team to control every step of the cheesemaking process for the utmost quality of their milk and cheese. Abundant and high-quality feed ensures healthy animals, who make safe and delicious milk that can then be made into beautiful cheese. The added steps of producing their own native cultures and aging the cheeses in their own facility create a closed loop for the entire farm system, so that every cheese coming out of Jasper Hill is truly the company’s own.

Most importantly, having so many steps in their operation allows them to create sustainable jobs for people living in the area, especially year-round jobs, which is not always possible in farming where many positions are seasonal. As Jasper Hill has grown, the Kehlers have also stayed true to their mission of investing the money their creamery makes into their local community. During the visit, Mateo and his wife took the group to an open-air concert at a nearby park. It was important to them that their visitors engaged not just with their farm and creamery, but also with the people and place as well.

After concluding the visit at Jasper Hill, Courtney and co. traveled to Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, on the shores of Lake Champlain, for the Vermont Cheese Festival. This one-day event included a series of conference speakers on a variety of topics, from the need to preserve heritage breeds of animals to sustainability practices, to the history of cheesemaking in Vermont, and a tasting event where local cheesemakers sampled their cheeses to attendees. This big party showed the diversity of creameries in Vermont, from small to large, the number of amazing cheeses produced there, and the friendly people involved.

Very few of those cheeses make it all the way across the country to us here in Washington, but Jasper Hill’s cheeses certainly do. During American Cheese Month, we appreciate all of the domestic cheeses that we can get here in Washington (especially our own!). We also like to think about how each American cheese is uniquely tied to and a product of the place where it is from, the people it supports, and the regional food system that created it. Food, as always, is the thing that links us, that brings us together, and can make the world a better place.

Until next time,
—
Courtney Johnson and Tailor Kowis
Co-Owners, Street Cheese LLC
StreetCheeseSEA@gmail.com
www.StreetCheeseSEA.com