“They did not see us coming,” says Mateo with a smile. Two cheeses aged at the cellar also took awards: Cabot’s clothbound cheddar won first place in its class and Landaff, a farmstead cheese from Landaff, N.H., won a second. The Kehlers’ Willoughby, a washed rind cheese (also the name of a Northeast Kingdom Lake) took first in its class, and Harbison, a soft ripened cheese made by the Kehlers, took a third place. Jaspar Hill’s Winnimere, a mountain cheese aged for 60 days, won Best of Show this August at the 2013 American Cheese Society competition in Madison Wis., beating 257 other companies and well over 1,000 cheeses. Three years into their grand experiment in affinage – the French term for ripening or aging cheese – Mateo Kehler is enthusiastic about how far they’ve come and the successes the Cellars at Jasper Hill have achieved. It is super sharp yet not bitter, crumbly but not dry, all you could expect. He offers a sample of the top-line cheddar – each wheel is worth around $850 or more retail. Another comes when he bends down with a special coring tool that he pushes into a wheel kept for tasting. It’s just one sign that Kehler is the big cheese here. How many 35-pound wheels of Cabot’s finest, racked 14-feet high for 10 to 14 months, are in the vaults? Kehler doesn’t pause to think: 5,860, he says. That’s a healthy sign, says Kehler, because ammonia is a natural byproduct of the ripening process. Their color is dusky mottled light brown, and the aroma in the vault is not cheesy but an unexpected and almost overpoweringly odor of ammonia. We are standing amidst towering racks of special Cabot clothbound cheddar, thousands of wheels stacked on fir planks rising to the ceiling. But not to Mateo Kehler, who already sees a sunny future in the 22,000-square-foot cheese ripening cellars that he and his brother finished building three years ago at Jasper Hill high above Caspian Lake. It’s an odd place to carry out a bright vision, in a 30-foot high domed concrete vault buried under as much as 12 feet of rock and dirt. In the 15 years since, they have also spent a small fortune expanding their operation and reinventing the whole cheese-making process. So in 1998, the two linked their fortunes to making cheese from Ayrshire cows. They eventually looked to the dairy farms that dotted this northern landscape as a way to make a living and hew close to their roots on the 200-acre farm near where they spent summer childhood vacations. He’s Mateo Kehler, one half of the dynamic duo (the other is his brother Andy) who founded Jasper Hill Farms in Greensboro after a career search that meandered from beer making to tofu. (Photo by Andrew Nemethy)He’s also a not-so-mad scientist in charge of a remarkable experiment, not to mention probably Vermont’s most unusual workplace. It’s best paired with a crusty baguette, and it harmonizes quite well with pickled green vegetables like asparagus and Brussel sprouts, where the acidity helps balance the richness of this cheese.Wheels of clothbound Cabot cheddar are stacked nearly to the ceiling of a massive concrete aging cellar at Jasper Hill Farms, where science and the cheesemaker’s art are being innovatively combined to create award-winning cheeses. The most common description of those who’ve sampled the cheese is a flavor simulating roasted vegetables in a garlic cream sauce. This rich and complex raw milk cheese is more expressive of terroir, and this is a more deliberate use of a culture blend. With aromas of raspberry and Dijon mustard, its bark contributes an oaky, vanilla character that makes the cheese an excellent companion for barrel-aged wines and beers with notable acidity. Mateo (Kehler, Jasper Farms’ owner and operator with brother Andy) wrapped it in bark to salvage the batch.” “It was too firm, we bumped it too far and could tell early on it would pancake.
“We were making Moses Sleeper, a straightforward Brie-style cheese, and had a batch where we were adjusting the moisture,” says Zoe Brickley, Jasper Farms’ director of development and marketing. Anne Harbison, affectionately known as the ‘Grandmother of Greensboro’, who inspired many with an outstanding commitment to her Vermont community, the cheese was a fortunate mistake.
They say the third time’s a charm, but in the case of Jasper Hill Farm’s Harbison, a spruce bark-wrapped, soft ripened, bloomy rind cheese, it took four tries to win the American Cheese Society’s coveted Best of Show award for 2018.Ĭreated in 2011, the rustic, spoonable, full-bodied cheese took third Best in Show at ACS in 20 and Best in Show in the washed rind category in 2016.
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