The differences between the cheese samples were dramatic. Before that it’s ripening, developing then the peak then where it’s too ripe and it’s going south.” “It’s got a life cycle there’s an age range where it’s good to be consumed. “Cheese is kind of like a living thing,” von Trapp said.
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The oldest was from February 11, and there was a note next to it saying, “Taste at your own risk.” The workers there sample the cheese frequently, to make sure the taste is consistent, to figure out how to improve it, and to ensure that they’re aging it just long enough-for Mt.
The newest was made on April 12, the day before my visit. In the lab, von Trapp showed me a tasting panel of twelve samples of Mt. How long the cheese is aged, of course, also has an effect on the taste. That all makes a difference in the final product.” “Different things happen in the vat, different temperatures, we cut the curd to a different size, we stir for different amounts of time. “Each cheese has a slightly different process,” he explained. After the cows are milked, the milk travels through sterilized pipes to a 400-gallon vat, where von Trapp or one of the other six people who now work at the farm add a tiny bit-maybe 40 grams, he estimated-of the cultures from the fridge.
There, he showed me the starter cultures for all their cheeses: different formulations of mold, bacteria, or yeast, in little plastic containers, most of them ordered from France. I got a sense of some of what von Trapp has learned over the years when he took me into what he called the “laboratory” area of the business. I just had to pull together all the right things to learn how to make cheese and put together a business plan that would work on our farm,” von Trapp told me, on the sunny but chilly day in April when I visited the farm. (Von Trapp Farmstead’s Oma cheese is aged in Jasper Hill’s extensive cellars, along with cheeses from about a dozen other small Vermont producers.) “Making cheese involves a very steep learning curve, and there wasn’t a ‘Cheese University’ where I could get a good education. To learn the cheese-making business, Sebastian von Trapp spent time at farms in England and France, as well as almost a year working for Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vermont. After spending hours per batch of cheese washing all the equipment by hand, they also bought a giant dishwasher. They added a cheese-making facility onto the early-twentieth-century milking barn and bought a variety of equipment, including white plastic molds in which the whey drains from the milk, leaving curds that harden into cheese, and a giant dumbwaiter to transport the cheese from where it’s made to where it sits a floor below, aging and getting brined in a warm, climate-controlled room. Sebastian and his brother Dan developed the cheese business together, though Dan has moved on to other things and no longer works on the farm. Alice, a Camembert-style cheese, named after the peak overlooking the farm Savage, a hard, alpine-style cheese, aged for eight to twelve months and named after the man who originally settled the farm in the 1700s Mad River Blue, a mild, creamy cheese aged for about three months and Oma, a Tomme-style cheese reminiscent of those made in the Swiss and French Alps, and named in honor of von Trapp’s grandmother. What they needed was a new product, and one for which they themselves could decide how much to charge.įast-forward about a decade: now, the milk from all the cows on the farm goes into four different kinds of von Trapp Farmstead organic cheese: Mt. But even so, with fluctuations in the milk market, they didn’t have control over the price of their product. They had already transitioned the farm from conventional to organic milk, which commands a higher price. The only problem was that the small milking operation of around fifty cows couldn’t support anyone other than his parents.
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But after four years at the University of Vermont and five years working for a software company, von Trapp realized that he missed the farm and wanted to go back. When Sebastian von Trapp was growing up on his parents’ small dairy farm, bought by his grandparents in 1959, he never imagined he would want to build a life there too. Artisan cheese making is helping the von Trapp Farm thrive for a third generation.
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