“Get Thee To A Cheese Monger!” Cheesemaking w/ Jasper Hill Farm

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Crafted on the Blister Podcast Network. I'm your host, Eli Brown, and today we're diving into the wonderful world of cheese. I sat down with Zoe Brickley of Jasper Hill Farm, along with Jonathan Ellsworth, for what turned out to be the most in-depth and fascinating cheese conversation I've ever had. In today's episode, we get into DeZoe's path from Cheesemonger in New York City to the Minister of Culture at Jasper Hill.

the story of how a pair of brothers turned a struggling Vermont dairy farm into one of the most respected names in artisan cheese, and why caves, microbes, and atmospheric conditions play such a central role. in transforming milk into something extraordinary. Along the way, we cover everything from the 9,000-year history of cheese to the science of mold and affinage, as well as touch on the ways in which artisan cheese is reshaping farming communities today.

And yes, we even talk about the angel share of cheese, a personal interest point of mine, of course. This episode of Crafted is presented by our Blister Craft Collective. which is a collection of some of our favorite craft companies. You can learn more about these companies on our website and we'll include a link to the craft collective in the show notes of today's episode.

Check them out because we are confident that some of these companies are going to become some of your favorite companies too. If you haven't gotten the chance to try Jasper Hills cheese, you can find it, in the words of Zoe, wherever great cheese is sold, or through their website, and I would highly recommend making it a top priority.

This episode is part history lesson, part science deep dive, and part love letter to a food that's way more complex and important than most of us realize. Here we go.

I am here with Zoe Brickley today, as well as Jonathan Ellsworth. And we are about to have the greatest cheese conversation I have ever been a part of. That's right. I am so excited. Yeah. But first of all... So where are you and how are you today? Well, I'm doing great. Thank you. I'm up in the northeast kingdom of Vermont, as we call it. So the most lightly populated part of the state. It's beautiful. It's already fall up here. The leaves are changing. It's paradise.

I keep seeing that name everywhere. Is that like colloquial or is that like something you would see on a map? The Northeast Kingdom. Yeah. Like our local, you know, Vermont public radio station like gives the weather report like up in the kingdom or in the northeast kingdom, you'll see. So it's pretty. popularized. I think a real estate developer like 100 years ago started using it trying to sell land in the middle of nowhere with thin rocky soils and 90 days of frost-free weather.

It's actually pretty brilliant. And so I already told you I was going to ask some dumb questions today. So here's like my first one. It just makes me think Game of Thrones. And I just wonder through the whole kind of Game of Thrones phenomenon, which only kind of wrapped up pretty recently. I don't know. I just feel like that would have been maybe a boon to everything going on around, you know, the Northeast Kingdom.

Just seemed really on brand with the zeitgeist. Oh, yeah. We're beyond the wall, as they say. We're up here beyond the wall with the wildlings making cheese. It's exactly right. What's the temperature there today? Oh, it's crispy in the 60s. It's dry up here. It's usually pretty rainy all year round and very snowy. But we've had a nice dry summer for recreation, not so much for farming.

All right, so we're going to dive into this whole cheese thing, you know, with Jasper Hill Farm, but we want to know more about you. Tell us more about you and your background and how you became... Well, your position is now my favorite title I think I've ever heard. Minister of Culture at Jasper Hill Farm. My dream job. So I started...

my cheese life in New York City, working at Murray's Cheese, as many cheese professionals do. That's a very common first step. It's like very well, very well known. So I grew up in the Midwest without cheese culture in my family. So very wholesome upbringing, but we weren't getting down on more than just cheddar and mozzarella, right? Nobody was. And it's interesting when I go home to visit now.

You can find a cheese shop. There's a Whole Foods with a service counter. There's an independent cheese shop. So specialty culture has found its way in from the coasts. Growing up, that wasn't a big part of my experience. So I really discovered specialty food and cheese as a young adult.

And I was going to culinary school in New York City and told my chef I want to learn more about cheese. And the first thing they said was, head on down the road to Murray's Cheese. So I got a job as a cheesemonger. The first time I walked into Murray's, I was so overwhelmed because there was this wall of beautiful cheese. There were these cheesemongers in these snazzy red chef coats, and they were like speaking another language.

And I remember going in there and being so intimidated that I didn't feel like I could walk up and talk to them. And so I bought a yogurt and left. Like I was so... And then I was just like self-defeat. It was very unlike me. I'm not one to give up like that. So I went back in there the next week and I asked to speak to a manager and said, hey, is there some kind of program I could do so maybe one day I could work here? And he was like, you're hired.

Like, no one knows anything about cheese. We need the help. Like, get back there, kid. And fortunately, there's little signs for every cheese and the back of the sign's a little cheat sheet. It'll tell you where the cheese is from, enough about it so you can hand someone a taste of it. And that's the most important thing, right? So you taste it together and you talk about it and all you need to know is that it's delicious. Okay.

Cheesemonger. We got to set some terms in this conversation. And as a little bit of background, so like. Eli and I, we talk a lot about coffee. We talk a lot about craft beer. We talk a lot about wine. I am confident Eli knows way more about cheese than I do. I'm not certain, but I'm confident. I'm starting at a low level here. So we just got to set some terms. And the fact that apparently there's such a thing as a cheese monger, like we don't have espresso mongers.

You know, we're pour over mongers. So why did that become a term in this particular field? That's interesting. I think fishmonger is the most common. Yeah. Fishmongers. Yeah. So a barista would fill that role. And it does imply a level of expertise at a retail level.

So when you if you're looking to buy a really nice wedge of cheese and you don't feel like you can just walk in and figure it out on your own, finding a shop with active cheesemonger. So an active service counter where you can walk up, have a chat, have a taste with some. Usually that person knows a little more than I did on my first day, and you can get some good guidance and taste what you try, you know, taste what you buy. Okay, but this wouldn't be like a cheese sommelier.

Would that get a different term? I tend to think of that as like fromager services. Like if you're on the road and you're hired to show up and represent cheese that way or table side, you're maybe a fromager. Okay. I also wonder if it's like rooted in, I would, I would think it's like a very old profession as compared to like barista or something like monger also.

sort of like seems middle ages to me. I wonder if there's like some sort of tie in there. It does. It makes you think of like an old English. shop where you walk in and there's candlelight and then somebody's standing there with a bunch of cheese in front of them. Yeah. Yeah. So it definitely it's so a cheesemonger is one who sells cheese in a service environment. All right. So you your first day you start at.

this cheese shop in new york and then like where does that path take you yes um a quick aside on my first day the back of the manchego sign manchego is a spanish sheep's milk cheese that i had never heard of and It turns out it's one of the more popular specialty cheeses once you get into that world. And so the back of the Manchego sign, someone very cutely put Manfuego.

because I just figured no one could mess it up and they'd know that. And with a straight face, I offered people a taste of Manfuego all day long. So you got to start somewhere. So that's where I started. And then after a few months, my boss walked in one day and caught me scrubbing the baseboards without being asked. I was just, there was nobody in the shop and I was keeping busy.

And so I was invited to apply to be the cave manager. There was a little set of mini caves underneath the cheese shop in the West Village of Manhattan. And we had a French woman down there for three months and then she was going to leave and somebody had to. keep it going after that. So I was the right place, right time. I said, would you like to be the affineur? And I said, do affineurs get health insurance?

Sounds good. Let's go. But of course, an affineur is a new term. An affineur comes from the French words affin, or the end, the cheese finishing process. So affinage is the... The cheese finishing process and an affineur is one who tends to those cheeses while they ripen and grow a natural rind. Okay. Oh, yep. So I had the opportunity to step in and train with a real French person. to take care of these cute little cheese caves and a big part of that work because at Murray's we were really...

sending through cheeses that were basically perfectly ripe. We were just making sure they were staying in the best condition possible while they were there, lining them up with the best shops and best restaurants and events in the city. And a big part of the work, besides just inspecting everything and keeping it in good shape, was storytelling. We'd have chefs come down, we'd walk them through the caves, we'd taste with them. So that was really where I developed the skill of...

telling the cheese stories. And that's what got me my job at Jasper Hill. And when was that, Zoe? That was 2009. So I spent a few years in the caves at Murray's and then got to know the... the team at Jasper Hill, which was really just Andy and Mateo Keeler, the, you know, forward-facing. of the four of them they and their wives Angie and Victoria started Jasper Hill Farm and sold their first cheese in 2003 so it was pretty early days we've got like a pretty good idea of

I guess like you're walking into it. So now like, let's take another step back and really quick go over Jasper Hill. It's kind of that origin story. Yeah. So. The Keillor family, Andy and Mateo and Angie and Victoria, they were, you know, newlyweds in their mid to late 20s. And this was right around the turn of the millennium. And they... had grown up actually in Bogota, Colombia, the boys did, and they'd go to visit their grandpa's and like their grandparents' little...

cute camp on a very secluded lake up in the Northeast Kingdom in the village of Greensboro. So Greensboro was like their childhood happy place. They ended up finishing high school in the States and came time to kind of decide where they wanted to put down roots. And Greensboro was their favorite place to be. But it's so remote, it's not like you can go down to the...

Main Street and apply for jobs at the bank or to be a software developer or something that, you know, there's one store in Greensboro. It's the Willie's store and they're pretty well staffed. So to make your own way here and, you know, to support growing families, you know, they really realize they'd have to directly contribute.

to the community. They need to make something, build something, do something. They had experiences in carpentry mostly, so they could build stuff. But another thing they noticed, there was sort of a problem, which is the... The thing that got people by for generations up here, dairy farming. We have thin, rocky, hilly farms, thin, rocky soils, hilly farms. You can grow grass and you can keep cows.

You can't, it's not the green belt. You can't farm like you can in other places in the country. But dairy farming always seemed to be one of the ways to get by. And they saw that getting harder and harder. They saw farms getting developed. They saw a third of the farms in town go out of business the year that they pooled their life savings and managed to buy up an old one that hadn't been used. The locals called it the old Jasper Hill Farm. That was the name of the last farmer to have farmed it.

Yeah, so they, you know, they were able to afford, you know, a 50 cow barn and, you know, 160 odd acres because dairy farming wasn't profitable in the late 90s and early 2000s. So, you know, an issue, a problem was an opportunity. They could afford to get into the business. They got a real chuckle out of the locals because it's like, you know, these farms are going out left and right. What makes you think you can make this work? Greenhorns, you know.

New farmers, they didn't have a lot of dairy farming experience, but what they did have was enough visibility. of the specialty world outside of northern Vermont. So they knew there was fancy cheese and that fancy cheese was having a moment. So value-added production from the very beginning was their plan.

They were going to take that raw material of milk, the thing you could count on being able to make up here, and turn it into the most valuable thing possible before they ever let it go. And the most valuable thing you can make out of milk so far is fancy European-style natural rind cheese.

So can we zoom out even further now and kind of just, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about, sorry, this sounds real broad, but kind of a bit more about sort of the history of cheese and like the history of... I guess what you keep saying, fancy cheese, I love that phrase, artisanal cheese or whatever, but like the folks...

who really, really started trying to do this at a very, very high, sophisticated, excellent level. Like, what should we know about that? I think, you know, as we think... and learn more about histories of wine and histories of coffee, etc. I am kind of less familiar. I got sort of some guesses and suspicions about where... that was being done and kind of heralded what regions of the world that was being done. But tell us a little bit more about...

that history. And then when you said a bit of when it maybe started in the United States, but help us out here on that more macro view. Okay. So 9,000 years ago, people. Yeah, thank you. Exactly. 9,000. years ago people figured out how to get dairy animals to hang out with them and so that was the fertile crescent right mesopotamia and we're we're we're milking animals and we figured out how to preserve that

fragile, volatile liquid milk into solid cheese really early on, thousands of years ago. And it's a good thing that we did because we over farmed the Fertile Crescent like immediately. and had to go looking for greener pastures. And so... Dairy animals are really foundational to our ability to have survived our first farming crisis. We could take the show on the road. We could take the animals with us and they could be grazing and being milked.

harvested for meat along the way while we settled into new places. And so cheese went in all directions from the Fertile Crescent. But the reason that we... In my opinion, the reason that we think about Europe as the hotbed for diversity of specialty styles that exist today has to do with like climate and geography. So. There's a lot of examples all around the world of kind of different versions of a fresh cheese, but in Europe we see like a thousand different...

cheeses of all different textures, all different appearances on the outside, different rind styles, right? That living community of flora on the outside of specialty cheese. So I think what was unique about Europe was that There was a lot of, you know, trade originating there. And also there was a lot of like cool damp cellars where you could keep food, which is different than a more arid.

or, you know, even like a colder or a hotter place, right? It was like this perfect temperature and humidity zone. So when you put freshly made cheese in your root cellar or in a natural cave, it was the right conditions for these. this flora that could populate the cheese, protect it and actually make it taste better as opposed to contribute to its spoilage or going off. So the, that...

There was like this golden age of diversification around a thousand years ago in Europe. And that led to all the big... the big cheese categories that we can think of today. So brie style cheese, right? With that bloomy white rind that softens it and makes it delicious. The monastic traditions, the monks who were washing the cheese with salted brine or beer because they're holy dudes and they're a little wary of white fluff growing on their cheese, so they're scrubbing it off.

and discovering a whole new set of cultures that could transform the cheese and make it delicious. You have Alpine... traditions, trying to make cheese while camping on the side of the Alps. Very harsh conditions shaped the techniques that led to what... what we now know is like a Gruyere-style cheese with that nice elastic texture that melts really nice on your French onion soup. You've got the manors in England putting out cheddar-like milled curd cheeses.

Every cheese, you know, you can you can think of a cheese shop like a museum and every cheese tells a story of somebody's problems. And every cheese is a collection of historical problems and the clever solutions that people came up with to get by. And so we think of them as being very elevated and fancy, but really these were like survival techniques that were adapted to very specific circumstances of climate and market access.

Wow. Well done. Well done. Thought you'd never ask. There are so many things in there, too. Like, I have so many questions already. So now that we have like.

I guess like the world history of cheese, which like beautiful summary. That was incredible. I don't think I know anything that well. How does this like... artisan cheese thing spread to the u.s and i guess like probably that question is like kind of obvious but like where does the popularity in recent times comes come from and especially like the

boom in popularity that allowed Jasper Hill to be successful alongside all of these like failing dairy farms around it? That's a great question. So I'm going to skip ahead a couple of thousand years to the Nixit administration.

So in the 70s, our collective anxiety was around overpopulation and not being able to feed projected numbers of people on the planet. which is interesting because now we're like, we're not making enough people. How do we like make sure we're like keeping it all going? But back then we were like, oh no, we're making too many people and our food systems aren't sophisticated enough to keep up. So they, the...

The Nixon administration saw an opportunity to be titans of global trade and get out ahead of the industrialization of agriculture. So the Secretary of Ag, Earl Butts, his nickname was Earl Rusty Butts. Sounds like a villain. He was. I mean, I can safely say that he had to resign just for being like an out racist. after his first year. But he was very productive in that first year. And he famously said, get big or get out and plant fence row to fence row.

We're not interested in keeping family farms going. We need big farms that can really make some moves for us. And we're into monoculture, right? Fence row to fence row, like plow it all up. Every inch matters. Like, let's go. They put a set of policies in place that really let it rip. And between the 70s and the 90s, so in just a 20-year period, we overproduced 4 billion pounds of commodity-style cheese. So we sort of overestimated the world's appetite for our like nutrient bricks.

And while we're just like letting it rip on boring block cheddar, we're also discovering this whole world of European style natural rind cheese. So we're importing record amounts of cheese, like the good stuff. we're sitting on historic reserves of our own. So TV chefs are popping off. We have French chefs in New York wheeling. you know, cheese carts around, white tablecloth restaurants. There's a big interest in...

Food in general and specialty cheese is like really having a moment in the late 90s, early 2000s. So when we did all that overproduction, the. the price of milk and cheese just plummeted, right? So it became really hard to make a living at a family scale. So all these like 5,100 cow farms in Vermont are struggling, but... At the same time, there's a growing market for value-added cheeses, right? So the stuff with the nice natural rinds on it.

It became this opportunity to keep your farm going for another generation by making those European-style cheeses. And so there was this real renaissance. U.S. American artisan cheese making right around the late 90s, early 2000s. There'd been some pioneers in the 80s and 90s. You know, I'm thinking Alison Hooper with Vermont Creamery, Judy Shad with Capriol, Mary Keene with Cypress Grove. You know, the 80s goat ladies really, like, set the stage.

And then a lot of momentum picked up in the 90s and 2000s. Jasper Hill is a great example of that. They get the family farm started. And my understanding is it wasn't like. awesome right out the gate. Like they still ran into some issues and then another creamery kind of comes into play. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. People ask what my advice is for new cheesemakers and I say, get some pigs.

Right. Because they can drink the whey from cheese making. So even if every batch turns out perfectly, you've got most of what a pig needs to survive and get a little flaked corn in there. But if a batch of cheese doesn't turn out, you can always turn it into bacon. Right. So I think they turned their first $60,000 worth of cheese into bacon in the early days, the Keillers did, which is tough as a startup. But they were smart enough to know that when you...

put cheese out there with your name on it, it has to at least be not bad, if not pretty darn good. So they waited until they had some batches they were pretty proud of. And then they got on the phone and they got like... you know, 200 shops and restaurants buying five or 10 pounds of cheese at a time. And so that was a great way to build your reputation, get a lot of feedback. But on the other hand, they were like...

knocking themselves out. They were chasing $200 a week. They were chasing $200 invoices a couple weeks later. It took them eight hours to print the shipping labels for like one day of shipping with the old dial-up internet. back then. So the admin work was eating them alive, even though they were finding early commercial success. So this is the mindset that they're in when the phone rings, because we weren't even emailing that much 25 years ago, right?

So they pick up the phone and it's Cabot and they'd been out in the market trying to hustle for their farmer owners. So Cabot Cooperative Creamery is one of the oldest cheesemakers in the state and the farmers are actually the owners of the co-op.

You know, their sales and marketing team is out there like, what can we do? You know, milk and cheese prices are terrible. And like, we got to figure something out. And they go into these shops where there's like, cheese is popular right now. So they go into these like new specialty shops and they see a British imported.

bandaged cheddar being sampled over the counter by a cheese monger. And then they maybe see their cheese in the deli case or the dairy case. And they're like, what gives? We're award winning. We're your hometown heroes. Why aren't we on the service case? And they're like, ah.

grow some mold on it and maybe we'll talk, right? So Snarky Cheesemonger gave them good advice, which is that if you want to break into the specialty market and have that higher perception of value, you have to have a natural rind on the cheese. And so they took that message to heart and they thought about it. They looked at what it would take to build a cave in the, you know, backyard of the Cabot.

plant and they're like let's maybe get some proof of concept so they called around and like they were like we'll need some hippies to maybe do the dirty work for us like who's got a cheese cave going and so they got a few cheese makers artisan cheese makers to to ripen a few of those early wheels. They still had the equipment to make a round wheel of cheddar instead of a block.

And that's what the Keillers did. They got a nice little babysitting check for taking care of the cheese every month for a year. After a year, the cheese tasted great and Cabot came to pick it up and shopped it around. But they weren't working with those shops, but they had those service counters. They were selling truckloads of cheese to broader markets. So they had a hard time kind of. cracking the nut of like where, you know.

how they would make that program work. And so they said, well, you know, this is fun. We'll serve it at the holiday party and kind of move on. And the Keillers were like, whoa, what are you doing? Like, nobody's at market yet with an American cloth-bound cheddar. You know, people are making brie style. People are making natural wine.

cheeses, you know, but nobody is making an American cloth mount cheddar, which is interesting because Paul Kinstead of UVM, dairy science professor there, took a sabbatical to study. cheese history. It's a lot of why I know what I know. And he found that American colonial cheesemakers in New England invented the

idea of wrapping the freshly made cheddar in linen and rubbing it with lard and then protecting it during long cave aging or for transatlantic trade. And then we just got so industrialized that like we forgot. that cool idea we came up with wow and it became known as british bandaged cheddar so it was wow yeah right so it's this full circle moment like yeah We gave up the home court advantage. Exactly. And then it became known as British cheddar. So...

It was this full circle moment where a New England cheesemaker is making a cloth pound cheddar again. And no one else had hit the market with it broadly. You know, people were working on it in California and Wisconsin, up in Canada. So it was really an opportunity. So they were like.

like, okay, just keep making the cheese, send it to us. We still have some room on the shelves in the basement of our creamery, you know, the creamery cellar they were using. They were really just this little farmhouse operation, 40 cal, as they're grazing them every day, chasing all those orders.

So they said, just keep it coming. They decided to put it on the market as a co-brand. So both Jasper Hill and Cabot on the label. And they first year on the market as this co-branded cheese that Cabot made and Jasper Hill sold. It won Best of Show at the American Cheese Society, which is like winning the Super Bowl your first year as a team.

this huge opportunity. And the running joke of the American Cheese Society is that no one ever has the cheese to back up the win. You know, it's like you could sell. a hundred thousand pounds of cheese the next year and no one no one has it you know it's like it's sold out before the news even breaks so the

The Keillers are really fun to work for. There's never a dull moment because they never sit on that kind of opportunity. And they literally went to the bank immediately with the blue ribbon from the contest and a contract from Cambit. And we're like, all right, we need an investment. We need more aging space. And within a couple months of winning the award, they were using dynamite to explode the backyard of their 40-cow farm.

And they built a 22,000 square foot, seven vaulted underground cave ripening complex in the backyard of their little farm. Just wild, like totally unheard of in the U.S., really unique to this day. And it's become this piece of infrastructure that's really supported, like transformative agricultural change in our small area.

An interesting way to go about doing this, I think, is going to be like, to some extent, going seller by seller. And I think so three and four are both cheddar, right? Four and five. Am I correct about this? Four and five. Okay. So. We have to get into the cheese. What is the cloth bound cheddar? So you wrap it in cloth and then hit it with lard? So first of all, what's that process? Yes. So it gets made by Cabot still. And then, you know, we receive it in.

They can pack the curds into the forms with a layer of cloth already around it, but we add some more cloth on the top and the bottom to make it resilient. And then we paint it with melted lard. And it creates this kind of like waxy coating, but it's not as impermeable as wax, right? It's more breathable and it's more organic, more probiotic than wax would be, which is...

Why it's been a convention. Is the lard like specifically... It's not like one animal specifically, is it? It's pigs. Okay. It is. It's pork lard. It's like very well clarified. Pork lard. And this... you know we're we're gonna get really basic here jonathan thinks i have all the advanced questions but uh so what makes it cheddar why is it cheddar what is cheddar i guess so good one good one eli what is cheddar

That's a great question. That's on my level. Yeah. So cheddar is the most popular milled curd cheese. So it's kind of the, it's like, it's the iconic milled curd cheese. And cheddar is a verb. So to cheddar something is to stack these slabs of curd.

that kind of settle at the bottom of the vat. So you, just like any cheese, you set the curd, you add your cultures and your rennet, you end up with like a big vat full of yogurt you can think of, and then you set the curd like that, you cut the curd, you stir the curd.

Then, usually you take those... firmed up stirred curds and you pile them into forms and in the case of cheddar you just like let all of the whey out of the bottom of the vat and let all of that curd settle on the bottom and then it mats back together and you end up with these slabs then you cut the slabs and you

stack them on each other to help force out the extra moisture. They continue to acidify. That's important for that crumbly texture that we think about with cheddars. And then, so that stacking of those curd slabs is the cheddaring process. And then you...

take those slabs, put them through a grinder and mill the curd into little bits. And so that's what you can buy as fresh squeaky cheese curds is like the freshly milled slabs. They come out of the grinder and then there are these kind of like rectangular. little chunks that are really nice to snack on. Or you can pack those into a larger form and that becomes the shape of your eventual cheddar wheel or block.

So cheddar, cheddaring is a verb, and it's part of that milled curd tradition. Interestingly, at Cabot, they have a more modern setup. And so it's called a stirred curd cheddar. So instead of this. the curd stacking, you let out all the way, and then you just beat the heck out of the curds with these paddles, and it...

it achieves the same, similar end results. You know, you'll have cheddar purists saying it's like, it's not technically a cheddar, but for all intents and purposes, these days, that's also a cheddar. Yep. So they do that whole process for us, pack it into these forms, and then, yeah, we're basically just trying to grow a living rind on the outside of it. That's our job.

Okay. And just to make sure I'm getting this right. So the cheddaring happens and then the milling happens. Yeah. And then it's the form. Okay. And then from there, you're going to wrap it in cloth. What's the cloth for? The cloth creates a protective barrier that kind of gives you a little bit more time to ripen the cheese and develop flavor before it...

becomes too crumbly. With cheddar specifically, it's a more crumbly style, and so it needs a little bit of help to kind of stay together and not dry out and crack during ripening. Cloth wrapping is particular to crumbly styles like these milk curd cheeses. Okay. And the lard, I would assume, is achieving like a similar sort of like it's kind of a similar effect. Yeah. Yeah. You're slowing down moisture loss. So we'll lose.

15 20 percent of the weight of the cheese in the caves it's like it's real yield that you're like the angel share as they say the angel share of cheese do you guys use that term too i'm like i'm a big spirits nerd yeah You guys use that too? Fascinating. The angels just get cheese and bourbon? Mm-hmm. Angels are getting fucked up. This is incredible. Wait, do you really, so you really, y'all really use the angels share when it comes to cheese and caves?

I borrow it from the spirit world, I'm sure. I'm sure I heard them say that at some point. I'm like, yeah, oh yeah, we do that too. We evaporate our profits as well. Be one of these angels. Yep. Yeah. So, yeah, first you evaporate 15% of its weight, which you could have sold otherwise, and then you bathe it with labor for a year.

at least. Sick. Awesome. Yep. And somehow the numbers work out that it's worth doing that. You really can triple the value of a cheddar by cave aging it, you know, from a, you know, a commodity.

block versus a cave-aged round wheel. It's like, it's a many-fold difference in value. So it's worth the extra, it's worth doing it the hard way. But yeah, the lard will slow down that moisture loss so it doesn't... get too crumbly grainy or crack so it allows for a very gradual moisture loss over time and then we're growing flow it's a it's a good

like substrate for the natural flora we're trying to cultivate on the surface of the rind so the lard is a good place for the mold to grow okay and with cheddar you what Like specifically, what's the mold that you're trying to develop on the cheddar? whatever whatever volunteers to be there which is a it's a hard thing to wrap your head around with a bloomy rind cheese like a brie you know we're inoculating that cheese with penicillium camembert like or you know it's like a very specific

perfect little field of tiny white mushrooms. With a washed rind cheese, we're trying to get a relatively simple community of cultures that gives it that orange pigmented look and stinky cheese aromas, right? So those are very deliberate rinds that tend to be... more inoculated. And cheddar is a good example of a natural rind cheese, which is a more laissez-faire approach. So basically, if you can set up the surface of the cheese to have the right...

pH, moisture, and salt content, that's what's controlling for what's going to populate the rind. So it's not totally wild. It's not just like... You know, it's not just like a soil sample, you know, like you have a pretty controlled set of circumstances. And so you're really like there's an aperture of what is possible to grow there. And I think.

People, the most common question that we get is like, can you eat the rind? How do I know if the mold that's growing, even on the cut face of my cheddar, is it, should I throw it out? Am I going to get sick? Am I going to make my guests sick?

The easiest answer is like, if you can see it, it is not going to hurt you. And if it's on a cheese, then you're growing the same things that we worked really hard to grow in the cheese caves. Like, congratulations, you're an affineur. Like, scrape it off if it bothers you. Trim it a little bit if you want. You know, it's good to go. You're not going to do any harm.

But you don't need to. No. You don't need to. So, okay, dumb question guy barging back in here like the Kool-Aid man, you know, breaking through the brick wall. Like, this is a thing, right? Like, I think we're in a... I don't know, relatively peak era of people freaking out about mold and mold in their homes and this kind of thing. So it feels weird to be like...

when we move the conversation to fancy cheeses and now this word mold, we're like, no, this is the good thing. This is the value. This is the, you want to impress your friends, be showing off your cool moldy cheese. So can you help? I preface this with dumb question coming in. So, you know, I can say whatever I want now.

Can you help us here? Like understand, like this is the stuff that maybe is worth freaking out about if you're seeing it in your shower or in your home ceiling or something. Why this whole other category actually is this very valued. you know, magical product resource that, you know, we're sitting here talking about and learning about. Yeah. So unlike liquid milk or unlike, I guess, drywall in your shower.

Cheese has three preservation techniques going on like gangbusters there. So we are acidifying the milk, right? We're turning all the lactose into lactic acid. Most cheese is lactose free. It's great. So we're acidifying. All the sugar gets turned into acid. We are dehydrating. So we're removing a ton of the water. And available water has a high correlation to, you know.

what can grow on it. So a lower moisture surface is going to really throttle who can survive there. And then we're salting it. So we're dehydrating, salting, and acidifying. So it's the trifecta of preservation methods, right? We're doing...

All three, which sometimes are just, you know, one or the other. For pickles, you're acidifying and salting, you know. So we're really like letting cheese have it from all angles. And that really narrows, like I said, that aperture of which microbes can grow there. And so you're setting up a set of hurdles. And so there's you know that who can get through there are relatively safe and neutral or positive. And there's really four.

pathogens of concern so there's you know hundreds thousands of possibilities you know out there and then you know like maybe on the order of hundreds or a thousand that could get through that aperture onto a finished cheese and only four we know of that are going to make you ill.

And so we can be monitoring for those four. We can be testing our milk filters in the barn. We can be swabbing the drains in the creamery. We can be sending chunks of cheese off to a lab before we sell it just to make sure that those four pathogens of concern are light. not in our process. Heather Paxson is an MIT anthropologist who studies cheese and microbiology. And in her essay, Microbiopolitics, Google it, it's amazing. She posits that we are in our post-Pastorian era.

So when we discovered microbes, we were in our Pasteurian era, and we went from not knowing you should wash your hands before doing surgery to being like, oh my gosh, microbes are... They're everywhere. And like, they could kill us. And it was like this terrifying revelation, right? It's like, we got to kill them all, except for like the cool ones that make bread and cheese and beer. Like, let's like keep those four around and like kill everything else.

And now it's like Jamie Lee Curtis is doing like Activa commercials and talking about a billion microbes in the yogurt you can buy on the shelf. Right. So we flipped that paradigm and now we're like diversity is a good thing. Microbial diversity drives all the natural systems around us. And there's a relatively small number of them, actually, that are pathogenic.

And so when you kind of flip it on its head like that, then it's more comforting. It's like, there are a few you need to watch out for, and we're obsessed with them. But we have the intellectual capacity to monitor for and eliminate them from our...

From our process. Yeah. Really good. So long answer. It's hard to say at a cheese counter, you know, don't worry about it. It's gonna be fine. You'll be fine. So the aging process, the other thing. between sellers four and five there are differences in like the atmospheric conditions correct and does the and so like follow up to that then the cheese starts in one and moves into the other and Am I understanding that correctly?

Yeah, so the reason why we made seven tunnels into the ground, as opposed to just one big space, be easier to navigate, is because we wanted the ability to make these microclimate zones. So by making the caves under the frost line, we have a nice rest. temperature it's like 50 degrees ish all year round fairly humid like if you can get it in the bedrock the resting bedrock temperature is really stable and that's

You know, not a coincidence what we're going for, right? We're mimicking those pre-refrigeration cellars in Europe where people discover this set of flora that makes cheese delicious. So by putting our cheese underground, we have to do very little to dial in exactly the right temperature and humidity so that we can like perfect it. And so in the case of our Alpine style cheeses, like the Gruyere style cheese that we do.

We make those from raw milk. They start their life in one cave. It's like a little bit more humid, a little warmer, and we really get the rinds like happy and active there. And then we move it into... a vault next door, and it's a little cooler in there, and it's kind of like a low and slow finishing process. And so that's a circumstance where we would move the cheese. The rest of the caves, the cheese kind of goes in there and is there for its whole life. So in the cheddar vaults...

That cheese goes on that shelf, on a wooden shelf, and it's there for the better part of a year. Gets flipped and turned and cared for. But it can do its whole process. And why does it need to be flipped and turned?

uh yeah if you never flipped the cheese it would probably end up being a little bit like elephant foot shaped you know where it like would spread on the bottom and uh you know the it the the moisture and fat could kind of like accumulate towards the bottom so you want to keep them flipped so that they develop nicely and then you'd end up with like a naked bottom of the wheel and a nice fuzzy top.

So even though the wood we have, we use like rough milled wood so that there's a little texture there. So there's a little bit more airflow. You still need to be exposing all of the sides to oxygen. We're trying to grow aerobic flora on the outside. And so, wait, how often are you flipping? Oh, boy. I mean, we're watching. These aren't like rotisserie chickens where we're just like nonstop. No, that would be great. Wow. I don't think I've ever... You're welcome for this. Cave number...

Cave number eight. Rotisserie chicken cheese. Yeah, the rotisserie cheese cave. You're welcome. That's incredible. Sometimes, though, we have experts come on to talk to us. Other times, we like to give back to the experts.

you take that incredible yes that's a great idea um no we uh when they're young pretty you know more frequently so maybe for the cheddars i don't know once every week or so uh and we actually have we've pioneered the stick method, which is we put a stick under the one corner of the cheese to kind of lift it up so that there's very little.

contact and then once that rind kind of firms up a little bit we can you know maybe move to every couple weeks you know as they're more developed maybe once a month or so but they They need to get handled every few weeks to stay in optimal condition for sure. So let's say Eli and I were like, we're starting a creamery.

We're going head to head with Jasper Hill Farm, Eli. We're going to start making some of the best damn cheese out there. What, um... What are actually the hardest parts of this process, would you say? And when you're a Jasper Hill and we are in that space of competing for big awards and all the rest.

You know, there's certain things where it's like, well, you need to get this right and this right and this right. But are there one or two elements where most of the best cheese makers out there, they're. all trying to compete at maybe one or two things. I mean, the ripening aging part to me feels like that weird science slash art. And I don't...

I don't know if that's the answer or if you're like, man, it's kind of everything. It is kind of everything. And I would say competing with other artisan cheeses is the least of your worries. We all work together. We're all like... You know, let's go out and hit the road together. You know, we really see it so that if somebody can find a new customer for $20, $30 pound cheese, that's a new customer for us.

And if we can if we can recruit more more people to appreciate and love this kind of cheese, then all the better. So we're all we're all fighting for market share with each other against standardized, boring commodity cheese or, you know. artisan washed cheese that's, you know, rindless, that's made in a plant in the Midwest somewhere and has a fancy gold foil label on it. So if you, you know, if you haven't taken a couple cheese classes, it's hard to...

to tell the difference just from looking at it. So education is a huge challenge. And so we really see each other as our best allies and collaborators. Okay. So that part aside, you know, what's the hardest part of getting started? I would say at this point in time is probably fundraising. Being able to invest in equipment so that you get consistent deliciousness without ruining your body before you have a chance to scale up.

So Jasper Hill, like we have this really and I see it now with new newer cheesemakers who've come along in the time since we've been around. They have beautiful small scale European style cheese plants. And those are the ones who are making the best cheese. They're using raw milk. They're grazing their cows. They're cave aging. You know, it's terroir driven. It's super legit. But they have nice stainless steel equipment that is helping them achieve that.

with consistency and in a way that's less painful. So that, I mean, you can start, like Jasper Hill, we started our first cheese, it was a hand ladled cheese. So literally it was made in five gallon buckets with soup ladles from the general store. It was like a perfect starter cheese, but there was market limitations for that style for us. And so at a certain point, you know, every time we're able to invest in a European cheese vat meant for the style of cheese we're making.

the highs become a normal. Right. So we used to get some nice batches here and there and then some problematic stuff in between. And then you have the right equipment in place. And all of a sudden, like you're every you don't have to cherry pick your best batch to send it to a client. Like I can blindly reach into our inventory and send off a wheel of cheese. I know.

It's going to be great. So that sounds maybe, well, so, okay, that's like maybe the starting. Eli, we got to go get really nice stainless steel equipment. That's what I learned. But like, let's say we do that. I mean, are you saying... you know, yes, education pieces to all of it, but that ripening aging process, is that actually not so hard if you...

have the right equipment, the right space, caves that are temperature stable, and the rest? Yeah, the success of a batch is really determined in the vat. Cheesemaking, like the expertise of the cheesemaker is really important because you can... You can't turn a donkey into the racehorse in the caves. Like, if a batch is problematic, you're just going to be exacerbating the flaws in the caves. You're sort of amplifying whatever is there. And if it's a problem, it's going to get worse.

So and there's much there's not much you can do to mitigate that once it's in the caves. There's a ton of skill, especially in like evaluating what a cheese needs to. to keep each individual batch on track, especially the timing of the turns and tasting to see what the trajectory of that specific batch is. I'm not saying that there's not a ton of expertise in cave aging, but...

The cheese making is really where you're setting yourself up for success. And even before that, the milk, if you have a really high quality milk source, I think it's fundamental, right? really clean milk from a dedicated herd, grazed cows, like all of that's going to set you up for success. But then, yeah, having, attracting talent, getting a cheesemaker in there or spending time making cheese.

of the style you're interested in, I think is really important. Is there one style of cheese that's more challenging than the rest of the styles? Blue cheese is really complicated. So... So when you, you know, I keep kind of coming back to that Bloomy Rhine Bree style, you know, you're growing. a community of flora on the outside of the cheese that's transforming it, turning it from rubbery and bland into like gooey and aromatic and delicious. And with a blue cheese,

You're making a surface ripened cheese inside out. So the flora that's ripening your cheese, the blue flora. grows in these little air pockets that you make in the cheese. So you have to make the texture of your cheese. You have to get, it's like getting the crumb of your bread right if you're a baker, right? So you need just the right amount of openings, not too dense, not too airy. And with the blue cheese, you've got to nail it on.

curds that are structured enough to stand up straight so they don't collapse and fall in on those hair pockets that you're trying to create, right? just the right time, you've got to go in and spike the cheese to aerate it. You hit it with stainless steel spikes to let oxygen in to fuel that blue flora. You actually inoculate the blue flora into the milk. A lot of people think it's injected.

Because you can see the veins and it looks like someone's injected the blue into the cheese, but really you're just spiking it to let air in and to cultivate that blue flora from within. So you're ripening the cheese from the inside out. It's very tricky. You can go wrong in so many ways. Is the spiking like deep, long spikes that are getting towards the center, or are you mostly affecting the outer layer? like are they are we talking track spikes football spikes what are we

Yeah, like three to four inch spikes. The goal is to get it right to the center without overlapping and wrecking the texture in the middle. So you want all your spikes to just barely meet each other right in the center of the wheel. Fascinating.

I mean, two questions. And why is it called Bloomy Rind? Second one, what like is the process that's turning the cheese from rubbery to like gooey and soft and aromatic? Like what's going on within? the cheese that's allowing it to do that versus like a cheddar that's also building a rind see what i'm getting at here does this make sense at all yeah so a bloomy rind cheese is called that because the cheese literally blooms

So first you have a yeasting step. So freshly made cheese, you've just turned all your lactose into lactic acid. So it's very acidic. And not a lot of microbes can... can hang in a super acidic environment like that. So first you get a yeast going and a yeast will actually eat the acids, they'll metabolize the acids, and they'll start to break down the proteins and release nitrogen.

And that's like alkali. It's basic. So you're neutralizing the acidity with your first pioneer microbe. And then that creates the perfect conditions for the fluffy white penicillium camemberti or candida to bloom.

so you've also added that to the milk and they're just laying dormant waiting for the just the right conditions you've got to like get the right pH, salt, and moisture, and then you've got to put it in the right temperature and humidity, and then you've got to get the right yeast to go and deacidify the rind, and then all of a sudden you have just paradise for these.

bloomy flora we call them and they literally almost before your eyes in a matter of days will go from just like looking kind of matte and off-white to like like a dandelion head So they're filamentous fungi and they really like they bloom and it's beautiful. It's very soft. It makes you want to kind of nuzzle the cheese. It would be very unfood safe to do that. They're very patable and snuggly looking.

And you don't want that to get too out of control. So you have to go and you have to pat them down, turn the wheels. And then we, you know, just after a couple weeks of that rind getting formed, we wrap it in a special paper where the cheese can continue to ripen on its way out to market. why is that having an effect on the interior of the because

When I've like consumed like a brie, for example, it seems as though like the very exterior is very soft and then it gets like slightly harder again. And then you get into like the cheese on the interior. Yeah, we call that. The edge around the outside where you can visibly see that softening happen, the cream line, right? And so you call the inside of the cheese the paste, paste and then the rind. And so in the paste, you've got...

basically a matrix of protein trapping water and fat. And what you're growing on the outside is all those microbes are depositing their enzymes as they're going through their life cycle. Like they're eating, they're multiplying, they're dying, they're breaking open, they're contributing their enzyme porridge to the equation.

And enzymes are little proteins and they go in and they want to chop something up. That's like they just got to go and chop. And enzymes are very dependent on the temperature. the pH, and they have to have the right microbe there to produce those enzymes. So basically, if you create the right, like... community, then you have sort of a predictable porridge of enzymes accumulating on your cheese going in and chopping up fats and proteins into small enough pieces that they can get into your nose.

So a freshly made cheese doesn't really smell like much. It doesn't taste like much. And then after it's been ripened, it's very aromatic. And that's because enzymes have gone in there and chopped up all of those fundamental parts of the cheese into literally into like volatile aromatics that can get up into your nose.

And is that responsible for texture as well? Oh, yeah. Yep. So as you're breaking down those proteins, you know, you have this like, it's like a sponge. You can think of a curd as like a sponge with all the proteins being the hard parts of the sponge, right? Trapping the water and fat. So as you start to chop those up, they'll start to relax, right?

And then you're changing the pH on the outside of the cheese, and then you start to, like, through osmotic pressure, draw out the acidity from the middle. And then as the acidity changes from the outside to the middle, you're basically, like, activating all of these enzymes that are in there that needed...

the right pH to do their thing. And then they start like turning their lights on and doing their thing and breaking down whatever they're aimed at. And you end up with this like biochemical cascade of flavor development that happens from the outside to the center. Biochemical cascade of flavor development. I think we've got our title.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. And so with a soft cheese, that's very dramatic and visible. But the same thing, the same principles are at play with a hard cheese. It's just that there's not enough moisture to give you that. visible relaxation of texture around the edge usually. And you have a lot more anaerobic bacteria doing their thing deep within the cheese. So even a block cheddar with a cryovac sitting on a shelf somewhere.

it's still ripening, even though you're not growing a rind on it. It's just that all of that ripening is anaerobic. There's bacteria in the cheese that are doing their thing, emitting enzymes, breaking down fats and proteins. changing the texture and creating more flavor. So in a black cheddar, it can take years, right? You have like two year, three year, I had a 50 year cheddar once.

After two years, a cloth-bound cheddar starts turning to dust on the shelf. It just falls apart. And so it tends to be a little bit more accelerated with a natural rye and cheese. Yeah, ripening happens with cheese if it sits around no matter what. It's just that the specialized kind of ripening gives you, with a natural eye, gives you that complexity of flavor that really drives the optimal value. Well, so this...

is remarkable. Yeah, definitely the best cheese conversation I've ever had in my life. But I kind of want to back up because a while ago you were telling us that the whole kind of... artisan cheese collective industry you're not so much competing with one another you're still very much collectively trying to elevate what we the normal consumer understand about cheese you know help us learn why maybe we should be seeking out um

you know, product from a place like a Jasper Hill, some of like, for lack of a better term, these... companies that really are trying hard to do things the right way or do things in a really principled manner. And that comes up a lot on crafted, whether we're talking to the best craft. breweries, whether we're talking to excellent winemakers, excellent coffee roasters, coffee importers,

You know, and I'd love to hear you talk a bit before we let you go. Just about that, like help us understand this is why we maybe should be like what we're getting and or why we might want to support. you know, some of these makers in a different artisan space where it's like, man, even though we might love coffee and geek out about that or love wine and geek out about that.

This is a category that I just know a lot less about, and I suspect maybe a few folks listening will feel similarly. Yeah, well, we believe that cheese is a powerful force for good, and... It's an anecdote to the corrosive effects that commodity agriculture have had on rural communities. So in a commodity model...

It takes a lot of money. Farms get bigger, fewer people farms. There's fewer people in the community. And then debt loads grow and money ends up shifting from the countryside onto balance sheets in a city somewhere. Farmers have no choice but just to get by our externalizing costs onto the community, onto the landscape. And you're affecting water quality, you're eroding soils, you're...

releasing a ton of carbon that's been stored in topsoil, right? So there's a lot of problematic things that I think have led to this awkward circumstance we find ourselves in socially now. big tension between like countryside and city and i see craft production and artisan cheese in particular doing a lot to reverse that those effects so

When we sell our cheese, we're setting our own price. It's not determined by a commodity market. And we're able to directly invest that cash right into our own backyard. track our expenses by zip code. And, you know, we see that 80% of our revenue gets spent within like, you know, a 20 mile radius of our farm.

We're buying milk now. You know, when we make raw milk cheese, we're only using our own herd. So a lot of times with artisan production, you have to be super obsessive about your raw material. And so you have a really... positive relationship with where your milk comes from, those animals are being cared for, and the pressure is off for every last drop of milk that you can get. And it's about quality over quantity. And so...

you can give the animals a little bit more space to have a comfortable and healthy life. That's something that I think everybody wants to know to be true when they're enjoying cheese, right? So... So there's a lot of positive impacts. When we buy milk, we now we pay a price that has nothing to do with the commodity market. We have a third party evaluate the cost of making milk.

paying everyone a living wage, making sure that people milking the cows can have like a 401k plan and health insurance, right? And then we add a profit on top of that. So when their costs change, the price we pay for the milk changes, and they're not the ones getting squeezed every time. So the social benefits are huge. And if you're able to afford...

true artisan cheeses, you can rest assured that you're having a huge positive impact for a real community, and that's helping to balance things out for everybody in society. But if the cheese didn't taste good, like who, like, it's not going to work. For all of your good intentions, if you're not making delicious cheese, then like you're wasting your time. And the upside is that if you're looking at a beautiful natural rind cheese. That's not a commodity. You can't scale that style of cheese.

well and still have totally delicious results. So if you're looking at a cheese with a living, beautiful, natural rind, if you're tasting it and it's full of these complex and delicious flavors, there's a really good chance that it was made well in a way that's supporting and nourishing the place that it came from as it nourishes you. So...

It's, you know, there's a true upside, even though it can be confusing and there's this whole world of knowledge and it's a lot to wrap your head around. Like if you go to a cheese counter and there's someone standing behind the counter and you ask them what they're excited about, they're going to hand you a beautifully made piece of cheese that...

does a lot of good in the world. One thing that has come up in some of our beer conversations is when talking with craft brewers, they have all brought up that there is a lot of confusion in the marketplace about like what a craft... brewery even is or what is craft beer. And sometimes it turns out that a massive company, you know, kind of either purchases a brand or a label or just spins one up.

And are we seeing any similarities or parallels there in terms of this landscape of artisan cheese? I hope you say not so much, but... This has just got me thinking a lot about very similar sounding conversations that we've had over the years on Crafted. Yeah, it is happening in cheese. You know, we're a few, a couple decades behind, I think, the craft beer.

trajectory, but the pioneers of the American artisan cheese movement are being bought left and right by European multinational companies specifically. So Europe is seeing the U.S. as a great opportunity to grow their portfolio. with new innovated cheeses and a huge hungry market, right? So that is a thing. I will say that in those circumstances, those companies have generally done a...

a good job of keeping jobs local, of keeping integrity high. But it's not quite the same achievement to offer a cheese. that way as it is to be an independent producer. So it takes a little bit of work to find a real artisan cheese. I think raw milk, like real raw milk.

Not like a chunk of cheddar in a grocery store that says raw milk cheddar. That's probably been pasteurized one degree shy of legal. But when you're looking, yeah, that's a thing. There's no rules about that. But if you're talking to a cheesemonger and you're seeing like.

A natural rind cheese with raw milk on the label, that indicates that there's a dedicated milk source and somebody is caring for that cheese by hand. And I think those are the most important markers of quality that are really... difficult to mimic at a broad scale. And so a lot of the, you know, when I mentioned artisan-like cheeses that are, you know, rindless, made in a plant somewhere and have a fancy label, they're rindless.

you know, those producers aren't able to make that beautiful natural rind. And we've done, we've had some grants that have allowed us to do a little consumer research and cave aging doesn't really register with everyday people.

Of course, unsurprisingly, that's not super meaningful. And raw milk isn't super meaningful. But for me, those are actually the most important things to keep an eye out on to get the very best cheese, because that's really driving complexity of flavor. And it takes so much. labor and expertise to do right, that you're not scaling it to a commodity scale normally.

so are those the indicators that you would be looking for like raw milk being on the label and then where's like an indication of seller aging typically like will it say just seller aged or is like you can see it to do some work on the back end no you Yeah, you see it. Very rarely would a cheese be completely de-rinded in its final format because you'd be losing, you spent so much time and expense growing that rind, you're not going to cut it off and lose that sale. So you'd almost...

almost always see it intact. So if you can picture a wedge of griere and it has that dark edge around the outside, that's what I'm talking about. The white soft outside of a bloomy rind brie-style cheese, that's what I'm talking about. So there's that exterior layer. It's basically like a probiotic cloak that's surrounding the cheese, protecting it, and making it taste delicious.

Thank you so much for the conversation, Zoe. This has been incredible. Oh, I'm going to be so far into this rabbit hole. I don't have time, but I'm going to make time. It's going to be good. Yeah. But never before did I realize like the amount that there was to, as always on this crafted conversations, like the amount that there is to dive into on these sorts of topics. And I'm constantly blown away by.

the knowledge that folks like you have on a topic that I've never considered. And so it's so cool to learn from the ministry of culture for the cheap. Yes. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's both. Yeah. It's funny, Eli. It's true. It's like, it's wildly humbling and you definitely, I definitely feel like a moron and idiot all the time in these conversations, but it's also like.

grounds for deep optimism right like it's such a broad fascinating world out there and something as fundamental as cheese which many of us consume many days of our lives to You know, to be like, wow, OK, there is so much going on in this world and let's walk through this door. And I do, you know, it's tough feeling dumb all the time, but it is lovely to kind of see there is this world where people. are trying really hard to do things in a very thoughtful way and well.

Ultimately, I think that is, it's really an exciting thing. And to have a conversation like this and for you to share with us what you know, I just think it's a great value and a great opportunity for many of us, like, I don't know. people that are just going about our lives and you've just opened up a whole nother door and world. So I really appreciate you taking the time. So.

Oh, my pleasure. And what I'll just say to everyone out there is if this is ringing any bells for you and you want to get into it a little bit more, get thee to a cheesemonger.

They're going to bring you in. They're going to make you feel safe. They're going to give you something delicious. They're going to help you navigate that landscape of the cheese counter and tell you some good stories. So thanks for the opportunity to tell our story today. It's not often you get to deep dive like this. Appreciate it. Thank you, Zoe. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye.

Well, that's it for this edition of Crafted, and I would like to say thanks once again to Zoe, thanks to Justin Bob for producing this episode, and of course, thanks to all of you for listening. If you're enjoying these crafted conversations, please leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts. That will help us keep this entire thing going and growing. All right, everybody. Thanks so much. And I hope you have a great rest of the week. We will talk to you again real soon.