Gimme the Dirt…On Cheese Camp

Mid-September in the Catskills is the beginning of my favorite time of year in my favorite place, where the trees begin their annual fiery show and the air at the start and end of each day hints of colder days to come. Our cows bed down in the middle of the pasture at night to sleep under the stars in the crisp, clear air: it is also their favorite season. Autumn. It’s counterintuitive to imagine me leaving the farm during this time my husband and I call “ours.” But leave, I did. And there’s only one thing that could pull me away: cheese. Yes, you read that right. Or, more specifically, cheese camp.

It all started last April when I received an email telling me I’d received a grant to fund a trip to Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vermont, where I’d be able to spend time learning about their process of cheesemaking from the hay fields to distribution. It’s called “cheese camp” because the program hosts 20 people once a year to observe, learn, and spend time together at one of the premier farmstead creameries in the nation. There’s no financial way I would have paid for a function like this on my own, so learning I’d received a scholarship had me floating through my barn chores every morning. To the general public, the phrase “cheese camp” might not sound too thrilling, but to me? I was childlike in my excitement.

While I waited, there was life to live. May brought the Meeting of the Milkmaids, the annual gathering of the organization I started to connect and support women working in the cheese industry. June was a month of farming that included chicks hatching, calving season, and preparing for July and August when apprentices from the Anne Saxelby Legacy Fund would arrive to live and work with us. Meat sales, a tasting event, stories to write and edit, and visits with friends to squeeze in between all the bustle of everyday life – it was all the perfect distraction from the waiting. And finally, it was the week before I was to leave for cheese camp. The grant I received is the “Back in the Vat” grant – apropos since I’d had little time to make cheese with all the other responsibilities of the spring and summer, so getting back to working with cheese again sounded pretty good to me. The grant is earmarked for four people working in the cheese industry in any capacity – makers, mongers, farmers. The granting organization is The Cheeseletes, a group of industry folks who hold a charitable 5K during the annual American Cheese Society conference each summer. Costumes aren’t mandatory, but they sure do make the run/walk interesting (cheese people have fantastic senses of humor). The aura of fun is matched only by their very serious generosity. Proceeds from the 5K fund the grants they issue – two grants pay for cheese camp at Jasper Hill like mine, and two others pay for study at Uplands Cheese in Wisconsin. My grant would end up covering not only the cost of the camp but also room and board and extra money to get there. That extra would prove invaluable when last-minute car trouble required me to secure a rental.

In the days before I left, I found myself getting nervous. I don’t leave the farm too much, so venturing alone to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and then spending the next few days with virtual strangers felt daunting. I needn’t have worried. From friends in the cheese world, I discovered several of “my” milkmaids would be attending cheese camp, too – not strangers, after all! And my fellow grant recipient Alisha, a respected cheesemonger-influencer-educator-event artiste from Chicago, had been messaging back and forth with me for months – she felt like a friend already. And so I found myself heading north in a brand-new rental car the exact make and model of mine, zipping past “moose crossing” signs, and changing autumn leaves that looked to be at least 3 weeks ahead of the trees at home. The miles flew past as I soaked in the scenery and listened to the Cutting the Curd podcast. My arrival at the cheese camp headquarters for the week – Highland Lodge – was silent: when I opened the car door, I immediately noticed the utter peace and quiet. The first person to greet me while waiting to check in was a milkmaid I hadn’t had the chance to talk to at the gathering in May. AnneMarie epitomizes the milkmaid spirit: she’s an actress, writer, and cheesemonger. The stories she has to tell are loaded with humor, energy, vulnerability, and intelligence. She’s a dairy farm girl from California living in the Big Apple. Our check-in to Highland Lodge took a bit longer than it should have because our conversation flowed as easily as fondue. I was starting to feel less nervous by the minute.

My “room” for camp turned out to be a lovely little 3-bedroom cottage at the edge of Lake Caspian, with a claw-footed tub in the pine-paneled bathroom. My windows overlooked the lake, and my roommates were friendly – two more California “girls” who made our shared space easy and comfortable. Dinner involved copious amounts of Jasper Hill cheeses and raclette hot dogs. If you don’t know what raclette is, stop reading now and go read up while I wait (insert toe-tapping here). I finally got to meet my fellow grantee, Alisha, in person, and her kindness and beauty were matched only by her intelligence. It was obvious I was surrounded by truly stellar humans. A glance at our itinerary showed a schedule packed with exploration of Jasper Hill’s facilities, from cow pastures to make room to cheese caves (22,000 square feet of them) to distribution area to hay production. We were going to see all of it.

The next day, and the days after that, went by in a blur. Mornings were jammed with touring, and we had freedom to roam outside. I didn’t take photos of anything indoors because we were required to sign a non-disclosure agreement that protects the intellectual property of Jasper Hill. The generosity of access was tempered by the reality that trade secrets are real, and the owners, Mateo and Andy Kehler guard those secrets well. Our afternoons were spent in the classroom; for me, some was a review of information I’d already absorbed from my training at Penn State, which I’ve put into practice making cheese on our farm. The best part of the classroom time for me was a sensory training that super-focused our taste, smell and sight on all the profiles in dairy from Himalayan yaks to local Vermont goats.

I’m trying not to breeze over the camp itself, or the obscene amounts of cheese I consumed while there; surely I could write about those details for many pages. But the takeaway, after processing my time in Vermont, is about something more important. Cheese people are eclectic, diverse, highly intelligent, and creative. We were all travelers of the same kind, even though we were as dissimilar from each other as could be. We were a group of makers, mongers, farmers and educators: men, women, older, younger…it didn’t matter who we were or where we came from. We were united in the universal appeal of cheese, drawn to this most special place to bask in its secrets for just a little while. The biggest secret, it turns out, is its people. Jasper Hill is a technological masterpiece. Hydraulic cheese presses are the landing place for curds carried through a special handling system once they exit European copper vats. Cheese recipes appear on digital screens atop equipment that’s frankly intimidating. Brine vats (so tall that ladders are needed to peer inside) are kept in climate-controlled rooms. An air handling system tunnels through the entire facility, with more digital equipment managing that system alone. Through it all, people bustled about – cheesemakers, affineurs, packagers, herdsmen and women, farmers – and Mateo explained to us that the technology was there primarily to preserve the health of his employees.

Cheesemaking and the dairying that provides the milk are physically taxing, and the technology at Jasper Hill is intended to protect the bodies that make the cheese. The cheeses produced with all the stainless steel and copper and electronics are still artisanal: they are invented by human minds, touched by human hands, inspected with human eyes, and tested with human palates daily, even as robots flip them in the massive aging caves. The cheeses are still farmstead cheeses made of milk from goats and cows that dot the countryside surrounding the main Jasper Hill campus. Many of the people bustling around the caves, the creamery, and the farm fields were women. There was Ellie, covered in machine oil: the young, college-educated manager of the cropping center. She proudly explained the massive hay-dryer, and shared the hay-making process with generosity and smarts. Zoe was our trainer, living in this tiny town in northern Vermont, but worldly, well-spoken, and teaching us with brilliance and respect. The certifications after her name make her a VIP in the cheese world. Many of her classroom slides repeated technical information about cheesemaking I’d learned years ago. Still, her style of explanation and the visuals of it are imprinted in my brain unlike my previous training. Our tour guide in the caves, another woman whose name I didn’t write down, was passionate about the details. The cheddar cave was the place I most wished to see because cheddar is “my” cheese: the one I make most often and the one I’m determined to perfect with my own twist. When we entered that cave, I exclaimed, “Oh my gosh! It smells like roasted chicken and potato chips!” and she turned to me with a delighted smile and said, “Doesn’t it, though?” The packaging facility of all women cheerfully wrapped and boxed orders making their way to cheese shops and homes across the country. Everywhere were people with skills critical to the end result: beautiful, award-winning cheeses. In the sea of technology, the most lasting image for me is the one from the make room, where a gigantic picture window the width of the room framed the view of the Vermont countryside: lush green fields divided by hedgerows vibrant with autumn color, and dotted with the cows whose milk filled the vats next to me. Those fields reminded me that it’s the grass that makes the milk that makes the cheese. And it’s the people at Jasper Hill who use their own brand of magic to turn an everyday foodstuff into something unique and special.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Sam, our tour guide, for the entire time we were there. Sam drove us around in a huge van, his extremely cool Spotify playlist the soundtrack of cheese camp. He took us to the world-famous Bread and Puppet Theater Museum, tucked away along a winding country road. He ate meals with us, making pizza night a time of connection and relaxing fun. On the last night, he scheduled dinner at a taco place in his town of Hardwick. When I saw “ax throwing” on our itinerary, I thought, “hell NO,” but once there, I wanted to try it. You could knock me over with a feather – it turns out I’m pretty good at ax throwing. I found my secret superpower, and it’s a huge amount of fun. That last night of cheese camp was raucous, delicious, and bonding. If everyone I invited to stay with us at Hilltop Farm takes me up on the offer, we will need to build a guest house! I hope they do because I genuinely meant it. Maybe we can relive our cheese camp adventures, and revive some of the spirit of those bright, beautiful days in Vermont. If I convince my husband to build me an ax-throwing target, we might even have another tournament. Or maybe, as the best thought, we will simply sit on the porch together, looking out at the cows, and munching on some Jasper Hill cheese.

Photos courtesy of Rebecca Collins Brooks 

Rebecca Collins Brooks is a farmer, writer and farmstead cheesemaker at Hilltop Farm in Accord, NY.  She is the creator and founder of The Meeting of the Milkmaids, a gathering of women working in the cheese and dairy industry. In addition to a small herd of dairy cows, she and her husband Barton raise Wagyu beef, selling meat to customers directly off the farm. Her best friends are two terriers, Winston and Molly; and Sylvie, a truly brilliant barn cat. You can visit the farm by appointment to see where truly good food is grown.

Connect with Rebecca via Instagram @catskillwagyu, on Facebook CatskillWagyu

Check out > INSIDE+OUT’s Spotlight on Catskill Wagyu at Hilltop Farm