After spending a few months at The Cellars I moved over to begin making cheese in the Cheese House. Bayley Hazen Blue, Harbison, and Moses Sleeper are made here and then aged at The Cellars. I was trained to make Moses Sleeper, a brie like bloomy rind. The milk is cultured in a pasteurizer then pumped into ten plastic coagulation vats on wheels where it is renneted in 5 minute intervals. All the steps of cheese making are staggered so that you can tip them one at a time over a table of molds, then stack these up and tip the next vat.
The make room has gorgeous view out onto the rolling Vermont landscape of forest mixed with pasture. The cows milked here are Ayrshire which have traits making them uniquely suited for cheese making. They are hardy enough to weather Vermont winters. Their milk has a high protein content and small fat globules that resist cream separating and binds easier to protein so you trap more fat in the matrix, increasing yield.
During my time at Jasper Hill I became a much more informed and practiced Cheese Maker. I learned to take moisture samples and to adjust the cheese make to try to fit the parameters of moisture and Ph targets. Doing this is a combination of precise measurement, intuitive feel, and experience with past batches of cheese. I got to work with very experienced, knowledgeable and serious cheese makers and my skills grew immensely. The cheese scene in New England is the most advanced I have been exposed to and the quality of the products shows this.
