To make an impact, we’ve got to grow the market for specialty cheese.Īll 2023 World Cheese Tour classes are sold out but I do occasionally have cancellations. That’s a lot for the artisan cheese industry, but it’s not that much milk. This year Jasper Hill is going to make 650,000 pounds of cheese. For us, cheesemaking is a lever we’re yanking to culturally, socially and economically transform what it means to live and work in the dairy industry here.īut given how successful Vermont cheesemakers are, why are the state’s dairy farms failing?Ī cow produces enough milk for 1,500 to 1,800 pounds of cheese a year. The farmers we work with would tell you they are in business because we buy their milk. We pay twice the current price for the milk we purchase. Today, we are processing the milk from 350 cows and ripening the production from an additional 500. It’s impossible for us to make a serious impact across the state but we can have massive impact locally. The fluid-milk market in Vermont is devastating, like everywhere. How well have you succeeded at this? So many Vermont dairy farms are still going under. Your objective at Jasper Hill from the start was to create a model for sustainable dairy farming in Vermont. I get a lot of energy out of that, and it ends up being contagious. Personally, I love my job because I get to get up every morning and learn something new. I think of myself as a “professional amateur.” I don’t have any background in microbiology or chemistry, and no cheesemaker training, but we have a lot of curiosity here and want to understand how things work.
I don’t know any other artisan cheesemakers who have a microbiology lab. We make a lot of cheeses, so it’s a big job to keep them all ascendant.ĭo you invest more in research than other creameries of your size?Ībsolutely. We get up and reach for the gold ring every single day. Employees understand that if we’re going to meet our mission the cheese needs to be remarkable. We have consistently made decisions that prioritize quality over profitability. The first line of our mission statement is to be the standard-bearers for quality and innovation in artisan cheese. Why do Jasper Hill Farm cheeses keep floating to the top of the ACS competition, year after year? How do you do that? The next morning, I could tell the cheese was going to “pancake,” so I put Winnimere bark around it. Originally, I was messing around with the Moses Sleeper recipe, and I bumped the moisture up. What makes Harbison so runny? Is it cultures? Enzymes? Watch the making of Harbison, including the harvesting and processing of the spruce bark, here: Made with pasteurized milk from two small neighboring farms, Harbison is a bloomy-rind disk heavily scented by the spruce band that corrals it as it ages. It’s hard to imagine another creamery surpassing this achievement, although Uplands Cheese Company has won Best of Show three times for a single cheese, Pleasant Ridge Reserve. Cabot Clothbound, which Jasper Hill produces in collaboration with Cabot Creamery, won Best of Show in 2006. Winnimere, another bark-wrapped beauty from Jasper Hill, won Best of Show in 2013. Jasper Hill, an ambitious enterprise run by two brothers in the state’s rural Northeast Kingdom, is arguably the winningest producer in the competition’s 33-year history. Bayley Hazen Blue, the company’s Stilton-like wheel, earned a blue ribbon in its category. For one creamery to produce the competition’s two top cheeses is beyond astonishing. As if that feat weren’t impressive enough, another Jasper Hill creation-Calderwood-placed second. *Note - Because this cheese is wrapped in spruce bark, mold may develop on the outer bark wrapping.Harbison, a spruce-banded cow’s milk cheese from Jasper Hill Farms in Vermont, topped nearly 2,000 entries to take Best of Show at last week’s American Cheese Society judging.All of Jasper Hill's animals are pastured when the weather allows an supplemented a diet of GMO-free grain. Produced by Jasper Hill Farms, one of the finest dairy producers and creameries in the Northeast.
Tastes of mustard, smoked meat, juniper, and wineįor at least 60 days and made from raw cow's milk. It sports a balsa bark girdle to hold all that creaminess in, as well as to augment the cheese's natural woodsy, pungent and smoky aromatics.
These conditions are perfect for making Winnimere, a washed-rind cheese that is reminiscent of the famous French Vacherin Mont D'Or. During the winter months, the butterfat in the milk skyrockets, due to the fact that the cows are mostly in the barn, being protected from the harsh elements of the northeast kingdom of Vermont. Winnimere is made from the winter milk of Mateo and Andy Kehler's herd of Ayrshire cows up at Jasper Hill Farm.
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