First Days on the Farm. WASHING CHEESES

Friday was pretty awesome in the Cellars at JH.

After the 7am staff meeting, we were divided into teams for morning and afternoon tasks. I was put on the cheese washing duty with a veteran Cellar employee. The goal for the morning was to get vault (cave) #2 tended to. Washing a number of racks of washed rind cheeses in a variety of brine solutions, meads, beers and other exciting fermentations, was the first order of business.

Vault 2 is where all of the washed rind cheeses live and grow. It is a high humidity vault and has a very distinct and often irritating ammonia odor. Jasper Hill Farm makes their own cheese called Winnemere which lives in vault 2. It is a delicious, spruce bark wrapped cheese. Creamy, meaty, musky, salty, gooey, melt in your mouth delicious. At Murray's, Winne was a winner. I never imagined, a year ago, that I would be there to watch the Winne's life cycle, from curd to shipping.

On Friday, I met intergenerational cheeses: from newborns that were just made next door at the cheese house (or shipped over from other farms) to toddlers growing a little bit of peachy fuzz in the vaults, to teens and young adults washed and turned for weeks or months to grown up cheeses, ready to be sent around the country to be enjoyed and consumed.

JHF has been aging cheeses for other cheesemakers in VT since they opened their humongous vaults a year ago. Cheeses from Dancing Cow (Bouree, Menuet), Crawford Family Farm (Vermont Ayr), Twig Farm (Goat Tomme, Soft Wheel) are just a few of the cheesemakers who send The Cellars at JH their cheeses to age (see previous post for affinage hyperlink).

OK. Back to the matter at hand, washing cheeses. We begin by sanitizing and cleaning all of the tools, buckets, carts, brushes and racks we'll be using throughout the course of the morning. Soaping, washing and bleaching everything before using and as we move through different batches of cheese and different kinds of cheeses. We have a detailed list of the specific racks of cheese that need tending to and pull them out of the vault. The photo below gives a little idea of the kinds of washes that are used for the vault 2 cheeses. There are brines, bacterial solutions, alcohol of all sorts.



The younger Winnemeres still need to be brushed with their bacterial solutions. The older ones are washed with beers. What is so cool about the Winne beer washing is that JHF uses regional specific beers to be sold to either the West, Central or East Coast markets. The beers infuse the cheese with amazing flavor. One of my goal is to sample different beer washed Winnes and see if I can detect the subtleties. We out out a rack of cheese and lay it out on the cart. Two small containers are filled with solution or beer. With a large paintbrush, we aggressively rub the cheese down and scrub of as much of the white mold that has developed on the cheese during the course of its live in the vault.
We go through the racks, gently turn and flip the cheese over and brush them down with solution. While they are in the vault, they dry out and drip a little, their orange sticky surfaces often adhering to the metal shelves they rest on. In order not to tear the thin rind, you have to carefully twist them off. Every rack of Winnemere is clearly marked with a date as well as the specific beer that we need to use.

When that task is completed, they get rolled back to their home. (Later that afternoon, we'll head back into the vault to find some matured Winnes to pull out and wrap up for immediate shipment.)

In the afternoon, we were going to receive a large shipment of 4 month old wheels from a local VT cheesemaker who ages her cheeses in vault 2. Like parents, we will tend to the cheese, wash it down weekly, then bi weekly, turn the cheese every couple of days to keep it from sticking to the pine boards it ages on. We will care for the cheese untill it is ripe and ready. JHF now ships all of the cheeses it ages directly from our very large and well stocked shipping warehouse.

Below is a photo of the new cheeses being unwrapped and shelved. Under that image is one of those same cheeses, older and orange, being turned on the boards.



At the end of the day, we had a little cheese tasting. A delicious Winnemere (had a crack running through the top and was deemed unsellable.) A super yummy - ('like a combination of peanuts and bacon' as a fellow intern noted) Dancing Cow Bouree.

Cheers! Ready for the weekend!

Next post: Greetings from Montpelier, VT.
Stay tuned!