Summer 2009
Jasper Hill affineurs mine a new vein for Vermont’s farm-and-cheese connection
By Leslie Wright
Photographed by Jim Westphalen
Cabot was looking to get in on the emerging artisan cheese market, and Jasper Hill Farm was keen to join forces with a large partner. Jasper Hill ripened 188 wheels of cheese for Cabot, then both sides waited for the money to roll in.
Nearly a year later, five wheels had been sold. Cabot was a prestigious brand with mass market clout; clearly something wasn’t working.
So Jasper Hill gave it a try. The farm’s owners — two brothers in their 30s, Andy and Mateo Kehler — tapped into their much smaller but niche customer base that includes natural food cooperatives throughout Vermont and high-end cheese shops in New York City. “We sold it all in 10 days,” Mateo says.
A light went on at Jasper Hill — and a new model in Vermont’s farm-and-cheese connection began to take shape.
Jasper Hill realized it could accept cheese from others and be the affineur, or ager, and then take it to market. If they could do it for Cabot, they could do it for small farms all over northeastern Vermont. It would bring farmers a much-needed higher return than they would get for liquid milk, and it would take the costly procedure of aging out of the equation. “The partnership with Cabot was instrumental in helping us to think big about what was possible,” Mateo says (and it also paved the way for Cabot Clothbound Cheddar to become a national award-winning cheese).Expanding further, the Kehlers also envisioned artisan cheese as a vehicle to support the local economy and keep small family farms working the landscape. This broader vision was part of the Kehlers’ original dream in starting the farm (see box), and it may even be encoded in the Kehlers’ DNA: their father Thomas performed a similar feat in the ’60s, pioneering the cut-flower industry in Colombia.
To bring their vision into focus, the Kehlers needed more room than they had in the basement of their hillside farmhouse. Last year, with help from outside investors, they built a $3.2 million cave for aging cheese.
While common in Europe, the cheese cave was the first of its kind in the United States. Twenty-two thousand square feet in size with the capacity to age 2 million pounds of cheese, it can service approximately 35 farms milking about 80 cows, goats or sheep each. About a dozen cheesemakers are already aging their products with Jasper Hill, ranging from familiar names like Cabot and Grafton Village Cheese Co. to aficionado labels such as Dancing Cow Farm, Lazy Lady Farm and Twig Farm. There are also, of course, Jasper Hill’s own award-winning cheeses — Constant Bliss, Bayley Hazen Blue and Aspenhurst among them. And the cave has added to Vermont’s growing national reputation as a cheese producer, even a “cheese destination” that attracts foodies with a taste for exquisite cheese.
The cave itself is a bunker-like structure, dug into a hillside with seven separate arched concrete vaults drilled into the embankment. Vaults are kept between 41 and 55 degrees, depending on the type of cheese, and the faint scent of ammonia, a byproduct of the aging process, wafts through the air. Wheels of mold-splotched cheeses line shelves six or more rows high.
By the end of the year, Swiss-made robots will brush and turn the cheese. The idea is to let machines do the grunt work while Jasper Hill develops skilled positions and better-paying jobs for humans.
Jasper Hill’s success is part of the fabric of Vermont’s ongoing agricultural story: the effort to link agriculture both old and new with local communities, high food quality and a sustainable model that keeps the landscape working in family-farm hands. But, Liz Thorpe, vice president of Murray’s Cheese, a renowned cheese shop in New York’s West Village, also says Jasper Hill’s aging facility has the potential to become a national model.
Thorpe has singled out Jasper Hill’s cellars, along with two other cheesemakers in the United States, as beacons of the future in her book, “The Cheese Chronicles,” due out this summer. She notes that having an affineur handle the aging and marketing of cheese is helpful to the small farmer. Not only is the aging taken care of — a process that accounts for about 60 percent of the labor of cheesemaking — but having a giant producer like Cabot on board provides the volume needed to succeed.
“It makes sense for everybody,” Thorpe says of Jasper Hill’s partnerships and model. “The way I met Mateo Kehler, he was just starting. I remember him saying the hardest part of being a cheesemaker is aging your cheese. He said ‘I can’t not milk the cows. I can’t not make the cheese. I can’t not send out an order. If I have to trim, it’s in the aging room.’” Thorpe says, adding, “They could become a model for a really viable, long-term approach to cheesemaking and distribution ... In 50 years, there could be models like Jasper Hill all over the country.”
In their own words
“We are a small family farm located in Greensboro, the heart of Vermont’s beautiful Northeast Kingdom. We took on Jasper Hill Farm, which had fallen into dereliction like so many throughout Vermont, in the summer of 1998. Greensboro lost five dairy farms that year, a blow to the working landscape that beautifies this part of the world.
We struggled to come up with an alternative production model capable of sustaining us, and the land. After exploring a few bad ideas (farmstead beer and baked tofu from our own soybeans stands out), we settled on farmstead cheese and spent the next five years building the skills base necessary to achieve our mission. In July 2002 we purchased 15 Ayrshire heifers, and so began our adventure in sustainable agricultural development.” — www.jasperhillfarm.com
