CheeseCon 2017: ACS Winners, News, Highlights, and, Seaweed

Alto Valle. Its curds are formed by using the thistle flower- seen on right. Served at the cheese conference’s Meet the Cheesemaker event.

CheesecCon 2017 —otherwise known as the annual American Cheese Society Conference—wrapped up this Saturday night in Denver, Colorado with a bang (or, puff, for some, thanks to local, legal dispensaries). The weather was right, the people were right, and the vast amounts of cheese were oh so right.

A few common reactions I get when telling people I'm heading to a cheese conference:

"I'm sorry, I thought I heard you say 'cheese conference...'", "Did you say a peace conference?"   Then... "Do you just eat cheese all day?"

Yes! And more (photos are of cheeses I loved tasting at conference events)!

The Boston Post cheese crew. A newbie creamery with must-try cheese.

Tulip Tree’s Trillum: triple-creme at the cheese conference.

Tulip Tree’s Hops. Beer mixed in with the curds. Gorgeous.

Before the awards there are the educational sessions. Some of my favorite topics and titles this year were: Teaching the Trade, The Evolution of Artisan Cheese in America;I Got 99 Problems, But a Bicyclic Monoterpenoid Ain’t One; Small Ruminant Deep Dive: Sheep, and Far Out! Unconventional Cheese Pairings. Spoiler- I was part of the panel on the last one.

In between sessions you drink coffee, hit up local breweries, eat vegetables when possible, visit out-of-town friends you haven't seen since the last conference, friends that only live 10 miles away from you that you still haven't seen since the last conference, network, and, wait to hear about all the awards and winners whose names are announced Friday night. They make you wait until the end to hear the Best-in-Show.

This year all of us were smitten by the Best-in-Show winners. All farmstead, all east coast this year!

ACS 2017 Best-in-Show

1. Spring Brook Farm Tarentaise Reserve, Vermont- Enough good things could not be said about this fantastic creamery and non-profit. The Alpine style that took gold is a piece of grass-fed, sweet, crystal flecked, aged cheese heaven. This is the second year in a row it placed in the best-of-show category.

2. The Farm at Doe Run's St. Malachi Reserve, Pennsylvania- Kind of an Alpine style, kind of a gouda style, this wheel is beefy, buttery, sweet, brittle, and addicting. This is also the second year in a row it placed in the best-of-show category.

3. Cellars at Jasper Hill's Harbison, Vermont- Creamy, oozy, and made with inspired milk in Greensboro, Vermont, Harbison could be Jasper Hill's most beloved creation. The wheel is wrapped in spruce bark from the farm in the Jura style and is best consumed soft, at room temperature, spooned straight from the wheel. Again, the second year in a row Harbison placed in the best-of-show category. Seeing a theme?

Find a full list of the winners here.

I got to see Louella Hill, SF Milk Maid, a cheesemaking teacher mentor of mine!

Yes. This is all butter. No filters, it’s that yellow- butter from grass-fed cows.

Because, Colorado beer.

More Winners:

The Daphne Zepos Teaching Award Winner was Vince Razionale, the Director of Cave Program and Sensory Analysis atGrafton Village Cheese, formerlly of Jasper Hill. HIs project will be on exciting cheddar graphs. Interview to come.

Cowgirls Peggy Smith & Sue Conley were awardedLifetime Achievemen Awardson behalf of the ACS. Makes sense. Not only did two cheesemakers help spearhead a much-needed project preserving farmland in Marin County, they've served as mentors and role models in the cheese world. They're great bosses, according to their employees who do tai chi with them once a week in Petaluma during the work break. They're wonderful people.  And they make damn good cheese.

Red Head creamery always impresses.

Oils, cheese, and beer from the 99 Problems session. Hello, turpines.

Mystic Cheese Cheesemaker Brian Civitello and his wheels.

Other highlights & news:

Landmark Creamery:  won awards. Not that they needed it, but it probably made them and their Kickstarter supporters feel pretty good ($28,887pledged of $25,000 goal). I love these ladies.

Briar Rose won once again! Cheesemaker Sarah Marcus is one of the best goat's milk craftswomen in the country and I'm always smitten with what she's doing. I tasted through her line when I recently visited and considered myself very lucky.

Ruggles Hill turned heads at the awards too! They're the tiniest farm making the tiniest batches of cheeses that I will probably never get to try out of the conference unless I move to the east coast. Where it snows way..... more than it does in California, so. If you like near Hardwick, MA, you're golden. If you have a change to get your hands on their wheels, do it. As fast you can. They're blessed.

News:

Mystic Creamery is moving from Pod to Creamery. After making cheese all over the country and in Europe, Brian launched his own creamery in a pod- aka cheese trailer. There he made oozy soft cheeses, and fresh wheels that chefs adored cooking with. Now he's moving to a permanent space also in Connecticut.

Tia and I at Far Out Pairings

My Session- Far Out Pairings:

Alongside Tia Keenan,Leigh Friend and Rachel Perez, I presented a session on unusual cheese pairings. Par for the course, I picked the drinks. Not par for the course was the nori seaweed Rachel paired to Camembert Fermier. Amazing. Tia paired a pickled, smoked brussel sprout to Challerhocker, and one of my pairings was Egyptian licorice tea matched to the same Alpine cheese. I was proud to be part of this amazing group talking about such a fun topic. More to come.

Until ACS 2018!

My 6 Favorite Parts of CheeseCon: An ACS Break-down

Three nights after The Festival of Cheese featuring over 1,500 varieties of fermented milk to eat (then follow up with a salad), it's time to hang up the #cheesesociety2014 hashtag. Or, the #acs2014 hashtag if you wanted to be a rebel and connect with the American Chemistry/Chemical Society from time to time. The American Cheese Society Conference this year in Sacramento was amazing. I'm not going to say it was my favorite, because I said that last year and the year before, and I'd hate to get repetitive on a blog that focuses entirely on cheese, so I'll just say it was glorious. And I'm still full.

My 6 Favorite Parts of #CheeseCon2014

1. The Cheese and the Microbe.

See first photo. 2014 was the year the microbe and cheese solidified their romance at ACS. While they were always aware that they were intertwined, linked, related, much closer than cousins once removed, they really got to know each other this ACS week. They were spotted sitting very closely at sessions like Microbiology of Cheese Rinds by Rachel Dutton and Benjamin Wolf, Ph.Ds. of Harvard University. They were seen whispering mold-type words in each other's ears at Cheese Salami and Microbes: Parallels and Discoveries with Wolf, Jasper Hill's Mateo Kehler and Fra' Mani's Paul Bertoli (both of whose goods are pictured above). They even made an appearance in the session I co-presented. A couple more beautiful than even Eva Medes and Ryan Gosling, cheese and microbes have decided to hide their connection no longer. They're out, they're proud, they're linked through Penicillium Candidum.

2. Coffee & Cheese.

Thanks to the folks at The Rind, I discovered that cheese and coffee are also quite close. Who knew, you ask? Well if you attended the ACS session that paired the two a couple years prior, you might have known. But that session was at 8:30 in the morning in a time zone that was two hours earlier than mine, and since occasionally drinks and late nights go hand-in-hand at ACS and hence I didn't make it to that particular morning session, I didn't know. However, this past Tuesday I went on a walking tour of Sacramento with other conference attendees, where Sara of The Rind paired Old Soul's single origin coffee with cheese. She also paired them with Ginger Elizabeth's chocolates, which good god were amazing, but the coffee pairings were what stuck. The lightly bitter and bright finish of the coffee melded perfectly with the richness and sweetness of the cheese. And her pairings were perfect- certain coffee appellations that were stunning with one cheese she selected fell short with those that she avoided. If you ever get a chance to take a coffee and cheese pairing with this woman, do it.

3. Butter.

The last day of the conference kicks off with a morning brunch of butter and yogurt. As varied in scope, texture, and color as shag rugs in a seventies household, the butter table was gorgeous. Some was cultured, some was clarified, some was salted, some was goat's milk, and others were cow's milk. A dear friend was kind enough to go back to the table for seconds for me. I swiped third tastes when no one was looking.

4. Presenting.

My first time presenting at the ACS, I c0-taught a session called California Cheese & Wine: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why. My co-presenter was the lovely, charismatic and devastatingly intelligent Anita Oberholster, Ph.D., University of California, Davis. Even, I imagined, if I made a grave mistake like calling Sauvignon Blanc Chenin Blanc (I did) or knocking over the projector, ordering the wrong cheese and ruining the entire session (I didn't), I knew that I would be happy to just be able to present with Oberholster (Ph.D. idol). I was also a little nervous. We were connecting wine science with cheese science with which I was familiar, but hadn't before presented to a panel of 22o of my peers. But all in all, it went really well. I had a blast, the pairings were wonderful, the attendees were interested and kind, and I only tripped once outside of the room in which I presented and not on the stage itself. I was honored and proud to present. Thank you, ACS society for inviting me do so!

5. Sessions.

One of the many sessions that stuck with me was Flavor: The Third Experience with panelists Emiliano Lee of Farmshop, Russell Smith of Dairy Australia and Leigh Friend, Casellula Cheese & Wine Café. Not only did we go over some of the fantastic pairing combos and reasonings behind them at Casellula and Farmshop, we underwent sensory evaluations. Using unlabeled cups filled with graduating amounts of bitter, sour, and sweet compounds, we identified at what points we were able to detect particular flavors. According to Smith, 20% of people in the U.S. and 40% of those in Britain can't detect bitterness. So we did that, and then we ate a little.

6. The Awards Ceremony this Year.

This year marked the first in a while where the majority of the big winners were the small production farms and creameries. See the lovely Audrey from Sprout Creek Creamery in Poughkeepsie, New York above? Three of her creamery's cheese won awards this year. Three of Bleating Heart's in Sebastopol, California strolled away with ribbons. Two of Briar Rose's in Dundee, Oregon won. ManyFolds Farm in Chattahoochee Hill Country, Georgia earned two. The list goes on - Lazy Lady, Ancient Heritage Dairy… and more. In a cheese world where many of big guys have heavy-hitting funding and an arsenal of culture cocktails on their side, it's wonderful to see independent, small creameries demonstrate that that small batches can go big. Congratulations, ACS winners! And judges. Small or large creamery aside, I didn't taste one cheese that won whose reason for winning wasn't revealed in one bite.

We have an awesome thing going here, guys.

7 (numbers were never my strong suit) The People.

We work in a fabulous industry. While you never really have the chance to talk to everyone as much as you'd like, each conference brings the opportunity to eat and drink with old friends, and to verify the coolness of new friends whose awesomeness you've only suspected prior to conference hang-outs. Until #acs2015- I've said awesome enough times in one post, and I already miss everyone. Signing off.