#consider bardwell

Consider Bardwell is a very interesting person of historical importance. He had a foundry were he made hard, sharp tools which are actually highly collectible now. He had a plate quarry and a marble quarry, so this farm was a real center of industry for this remote little pocket of south-western Vermont.

The Bardwell family operated the farm and made cheese up until the 1930s when they lost everything in the depression. The farm changed hands to the Nelsons, who continued manufacturing cheese here under the name The Nelsonville Cheese Company. From what we can tell, they probably manufactured here until the 1960’s and then they just sold fluid milk. That incantation of the farm ran until 1991 when old man Nelson died. For about ten years the farm was just down and out, not working and falling into disrepair.

Angela Miller and Russell Glover (the current owners of Consider Bardwell) purchased the property in 2001 while they were visiting friends up in the area around Thanksgiving. The day after Thanksgiving they were going around and looking at places they were asking one of the local real estate people about farms that were available. The real estate broker said to them “there’s this other old place up far out of the way in West Pawlet, but you don’t want to see that place because it’s a total mess. I’m not even going to bring you there because it’s such a disaster.” Angela and Russ insisted on seeing it, fell in love and made an offer the very next day.

It’s really great old property on 300 hundred acres and there aren’t too many properties like this left in this region of the world. In 2001, the Millers purchased the property and by 2004 they were licensed for cheese making. I joined them in 2006 when they had just got things going, with a few goats making some basic fresh goat cheese and feta for our local market, the same way that most small goat dairies start. We brought on a consultant named Peter Dixon who’s an excellent regional cheese maker here. He helped us develop the recipes and put in the foundation for the business we have today.

This is a good, funny story that shows the pragmatism of “being Vermont”. Ms. Nelson (the former owner) had been carrying the farms for years and it wasn’t a working farm and was losing money. There’s the original old cheese making factory you will see on our property right behind a big pond. That water from the pond was driven through a steel way and a water wheel that powered the mechanisms of the original cheese factory. The factory was evidently in disrepair and falling apart. The story goes that Ms. Nelson one day decided that she couldn’t pay the tax burden on the property so she burned downed the plant because less buildings meant lower taxes. Why burn down Vermont’s oldest cheese factory? To save money on taxes of course.

So we have taken the farm over with a bit of different goals in mind. What we want to do is restore the history here. Bring back the cheese making and the network of farms. We developed our farm as the dairy source in a network of local farms that supply us cow and goat milk.  We recreate that co-op atmosphere where local farms bring milk to our site to be processed in cheeses. Our goal is to develop that in a sustainable way so that cheese is being made here for another 100 years as it was originally.

When I started in 2006 we were making about ten thousand pounds of cheese. This past year, we made around 75,000 pounds. So we’ve been really growing every year, quite quickly for this type of business. This year we plan to make about 80,000 pounds of cheese and that’s a nice level at which we can sustain our set of highly trained employees and operate a business rationally and economically. We’ve built our system, we’ve built our creamery, we’ve built our aging rooms, we’ve built our herds of animals. We feel that our quality has gotten better and better over the years. It’s at a very high level now. Now that we have our systems in place we will just continue the focus on quality and make those minute changes in our systems that can really differentiate our cheese from all the cheeses out there, of which are an ever growing number.

And this also relates to sustainability. We’re looking to grow in a pace and consistent way that is sustainable over time. Our animals are well-cared for, and they’re not over-grazing our pastures, and the milk continues to be quality. We’ve created a great internal team, the farmers who supply the milk, the creamery crew who processes it. With all those people together, the stronger we can make them, the better cheese we make. So that’s what we’re focusing on now. Our goal, as I said, is to create a system here that will produce high quality cheese in a sustainable way over time, that will be here long after all of us are gone.

We’re very realistic about our business in terms of we’re not over speculating financially. We do things in real time. If we need a new piece of equipment, or another part of the operation built, we build it ourselves. Or we buy used equipment, recondition it, and get it working instead of going out and buying every new thing that’s out there. All those things do impact sustainability over time. If we have a giant debt-load, we’re not going to be here in five years. So we’re really conscious of that as we build the business.

Our goal is to increase, over time, to about 100,000 pounds of cheese a year. And that’s a level at which we’ve modeled things where we feel we can assure quality, top level animal care and also be financially viable. We want to work with our partner farms to make them stronger, help them increase their volume in a sustainable way so that they’re more independently viable. In this very remote rural area here, there’s not a lot of jobs, not a lot of economy. We want to create something here that spurs industry for this region, supplies jobs, maintains working landscapes, and keeps the farms here working instead of being turned into summer homes. Dairy is in decline in this state and region, and we’re trying to push that rock back up the hill. We’re recreating what Consider Bardwell was in the 19th Century, an important piece of the local economy.

I think that we have seen a lot of growth in the U.S. cheese industry. And in that rush, not everyone has paid as much attention to food safety as they need to. There hasn’t been, necessarily, clear regulation in place from the federal or the state level. In Vermont, we’re very lucky. We have incredible support from the state in the Department of Agriculture. They’re effective, they’re amazing, and they really help us problem solve and increase our quality. It’s a challenge to the industry, because not every state has that same level of knowledge or dedication. What we’ve done for our business is we’ve created a HACCP plan, hazard analysis and critical control point plan, basically the top tier of food production protocol that ensures safe food production. But I do think that food safety is really going to impact a lot of American cheesemakers in terms of economy. It is expensive to create and run this type of system, but it’s very important. What we’ve found it that our HAACP definitely helps us make safe food, but it’s also really helps us increase our quality. Cheese has gotten better since we’ve engaged this process. We’re always thinking about food safety, codifying everything we do, logging all our temperatures and our process. It’s a mindset that you get into.

I think that as the trend continues towards more food safety, that’s actually going to increase cheese quality overall. There’s a lot of really great cheese being made in the U.S., but it has even gotten better in the last few years.  I think that the industry can standardize and increase the quality of their practices over time. The public will start to take trust in the products we’ve produced, and I think that will help the whole industry collectively over time.

We are trying to recreate the European model here. We went out and convinced new and existing local farmers that have gone out of dairying in our local area to come back and start dairying for us. On our property we milk a hundred goats and we now have three farms in addition to our own.

The Brooks’ Farm is next door and they have twenty cows. The Brooks are fifth generation dairy farmers from upstate New York who were looking for a change. The property next door to us came up for sale and we connected them. They bought and restored it. Now they are milking for us.

The Larson Farm is about 5 miles north of us. They were a military family who had stopped doing conventional dairying because they did not want to grow corn for feed. When we went to them and said we wanted to source grass-based, pasture-based raw milk for cheese making, that met a lot of their goals. They actually got back into dairying for us.

We have a small dairy run by a woman named Karen Gutman.  She’s about 5 miles away in Middletown Springs. She was a former university professor who loves goats and wanted to get into goat dairying.  We were able to help her get started by creating a market.

With all the farms we work with, we take all their supply, all their production. We’re also intimately involved with their operations. We inspect the farms. We do quality and bacteriological testing on their milk. We’re on the property; we’re working with the farmers.  We need these animals to make quality cheese. The system is all pasture-based and grass-based with only supplemental grains.  This diet gives us the quality of milk we need to make our cheeses.

Also importantly, all the farms including our own are all animal welfare approved by AWA.  They’re an independent animal care auditing group based out of D.C. They came up with the highest level of standards for animal care and welfare. We require that all of our supplier farms follow that system. We can tell you that we take care of our animals.  When someone else audits and verifies it, we hope that people understand that we really do practice what we preach A well cared for animal can live a longer, healthier, more productive life than one that is put in a conventional system and not treated as well. We believe that makes better cheese.

All of our cheeses are based on certain traditions, but they’re all our original cheeses. As cheesemakers, it’s fun for us to make something that’s slightly more original and more characteristic of our farm.  

Our goal in making cheese is to take great milk and do as little as possible to it, in order to let the milk express its true flavor. So nature is our partner in developing these cheeses.  That’s the bacteria that are present in the milk; that’s the mold, yeasts, and microflora that are resonant in our caves.  Nature is in control, and we’re just trying to guide it a little bit and create a unique, healthy, wholesome, well-made food.

We’re not obsessed with making the cheese exactly the same every time, so there will be batches that are slightly different from one another. And to us that’s more of an expression of the characteristics of the milk and the terroir of the farm.

We built our own entire system and network of caves. Cave is the traditional word, but they’re aging rooms. About 50 degrees temperature, about 90 percent humidity, basically a cold and humid room  in which mold and bacteria like to grow. We have a system of six caves now, and each cheese has its own cave and its own slightly different environment. Some are more moist, some are a little cooler, some a little warmer. Last year we completed an entire cave for Rupert. We can take that cheese out for a year and really unlock the flavor potential of that cheese.

I think it was in 2007, we entered our cheeses into the American Cheese Society competition. We had this new cheese called Rupert.  We thought it was coming out pretty good and we wanted to send some down just to see how we did. We figured it would help us judge ourselves against our peers.  We sent a wheel and the results were posted at the end of the conference. Rupert took best in class in its category, and then it took third best in show! I think there were almost a thousand cheeses entered that year. We were flabbergasted to see this cheese win a ribbon in the best in show category, and it was a great celebration.

But then everyone started calling us, looking for that cheese. I think at that time we had fifty or sixty cheeses aging, maybe ten or twelve of which were ready. It was on the market, but on a very local, regional scale. And so, we were getting calls from everywhere for this cheese and I kept saying ‘I just don’t have it’ and they said ‘Well, can’t you get more?’ and, ‘No, actually we can’t just get more, we make the stuff and it takes time!’ We only had so much cow’s milk at that point to devote to Rupert. Financially, as a young business, we couldn’t afford to put all of our milk into Rupert. I liken it to taking your whole paycheck and putting it all in your 401K and not be able to touch it until later.

We’d love to bring every cheesemaker we partner with around to every shop we sell but that’s not always possible. 

While we can’t bring you every cheesemaker, we can bring you their stories.  We recently sat down with Chris Gray of Consider Bardwell for a long interview and will be releasing the highlights in three installments.  Today, we posted the first section that focuses on the cheeses we offer from Consider Bardwell- Manchester, Dorset, Pawlet, and Rupert. 

The cheeses of Consider Bardwell

I’ll start with Manchester, our raw goat tomme, the first raw milk aged cheese we made here on the farm after transitioning out of fresh production. It’s a unique cheese in that we acidify it with a native culture, you could think of that as like a mother culture if you were making bread that you carried over, or yogurt. Most commercial cheeses are made with cultures that are laboratory produced in Europe, they’re very specialized cheesemaking cultures.  You get a packet of freeze-dried material from Europe and that’s the bacteria that goes into your milk content to help it acidify, break down the lactose, and then create cheese. Those cultures have a very direct influence on the characteristics of the cheese, and how they end up tasting and feeling in your mouth.

What we do with Manchester is very unique.  We take milk from our very best goats, and we incubate that, creating a natural bloom of bacteria within that culture which we carry from week to week.  We have three different strains that we use that come from our three best goats, and we’ve been carrying these for about three years now. So we basically use our milk to acidify our own milk to make our cheese.

The milk is made as a result of the forage and the grasses that the goats are eating so there are all-natural bacteria living in that milk. We have been able to isolate and remove the cheese making cultures that we need from the milk and add it back into the milk in order to create cheese. So there’s nothing from the outside world that’s going into making Manchester other than salt and rennet. Manchester is then aged in our caves which are all on our premises, so this becomes a purely terroir driven cheese.

Over time this has become a very unique product to us and you could say that Manchester could only be made here on this property in this time and place… it makes it a very unique cheese compared to other tomme style cheeses that are on the market.

We are a seasonal dairy, meaning we only milk our goats on their natural cycle, which begins in March when they have their kids, through the middle of December when they start to slow down their lactation. The goats are not milking and stay dry from middle December through the end of February. In order to make up for that seasonal schedule and also for the very little milk that’s given by a goat we decided to create a line of cow’s milk cheese which could fill in those gaps in production and time.

We have three main raw cow’s milk cheese: Dorset, a washed-rind, Pawlet, a tomme style, and Rupert, an alpine style. They kind of evolved in that order.

We turn Dorset out to the market at about 60 days. It’s a soft, buttery, pungent style and it has a very active, bacteria-driven rind. You’ll notice it has an orange characteristic and that’s indicative of b linens, which are the main cheese ripening bacteria. It’s a soft, pungent cheese that really gives a great expression of the cows milk that we use. Jersey milk is a very high fat, high solid milk, and when people taste Dorset, they ask if there’s cream added. There’s no additional cream added, it just has a great mouth-feel. That’s just the natural expression of the really high fat Jersey milk that the cheese is made from.

After that we developed a cheese called Pawlet. All of our recipes, while based on traditional recipes, are really of our own creation. Pawlet is a very good example. It’s a tomme cheese, and tomme-style cheeses are generally a pressed-curd cheese that’s aged three to six months, medium-bodied, medium palate level, not too aggressive, not too subtle. Tomme d’Savoie is your most well-recognized form of that cheese. We were looking at Italian-style tommes, which they call toma, when we were developing this cheese.  They tend to be a little more aged and not quite as soft. We’re taking all those ideas in cheesemaking from all over Europe and incorporating it into our cheeses. Unike many other tommes, Pawlet is really a washed-rind.  We’ve spent a lot of time washing that cheese, and developing a really nice orange rind early.  That brings out some of the more funky, umami, soy, fermented flavors in this cheese that wouldn’t have come out if we had done a traditional tomme affinage, which is more mold-based dry-rinded…

Right now it’s a five month or so aged profile on that cheese, and in the first three months we wash it three times a week, every week. It’s really orange and it looks like a giant washed-rind cheese. But then we let it finish in a cave that’s a little cooler and drier, and it gets a dry-molded rind that finishes on top of the washed-rind. If you try Pawlet on its own, it has a certain flavor, and then if you try a piece of the cheese with the rind as well, you get another dimension in the cheese. This makes it very different from other tommes that are out in the market. Pawlet is an example of a traditional style tomme that we’re taking and reinterpreting here, developing it differently than it would be back in Europe where they’re bound by tradition to follow the same system of affinage for that style of cheese.

Pawlet has a straight-forward approachable kind of flavor, medium-bodied, medium sharpness.  But then it’s got the funky edge, that is more of interest to a developed cheese-buyer or aficionado, where they can taste more of the subtleties in the milk. It’s a kind of a chameleon of a cheese in that way.  Families love it, kids love it, it’s great for sandwiches, but we have a lot of very high end restaurants nationwide that feature Pawlet on a cheese plate at the same time, so it works in both worlds.

Finally we have Rupert, an alpine-style cheese made in the tradition of comte and gruyere and appenzeller and the like. It was a cheese that we would make and sell at about six months originally at our farmer’s market.  We described it as a good wholesome cheese. Over time we’ve managed to increase the age of the cheese to the point where it goes out more toward ten months to a year in age. After that amount of time, the fermentation that’s happening within the cheese unlocks all these subtle flavors that are resonant in the milk. You don’t get that unless you have the patience to age a cheese that long. By the end of a year, it’s sweet, fruity, a lot of complex flavors in there, you can get sometimes more of the umami and soy dimensions. Sometimes it’s more fruity in a tropical sense. You get little hints of mango and things like that. You get nuttiness in some batches, too, kind of cashew, toasted almond, those types of flavors. And it’s a very approachable cheese, but it’s also one that you can sit down with a nice full-bodied red, some food pairings, and really explore all the layers of flavor.

We have a tasting program for all of our cheeses. But with Rupert, because it’s such a long age profile, we do try to taste it more often and along the way. All the cheeses are made by hand here, and Rupert is the one that has the most variety wheel to wheel.