Celebrity Dairy - an unlikely history
How do you make cheese? "First, you get a goat". We did,and
the rest followed.
Why a Goat?
"Nobody intends to get into goats - its always an accident".
So I was told by Wesley Thielke in Chino Arizona after buying his dairy
processing plant sight unseen, and living with his family for 3 days while
loading the equipment into a truck for transport back to North Carolina.
He knew: after 30 years of cow dairying, he sold the Wisconsin farm after
WWII and moved to LA, but bought a goat when his first child proved allergic
to cow's milk. Thus began 40 years of goat dairying.
Discovering Goats & Cheese -
Our discovery started when we moved back to North Carolina in 1987 from
Florida to an old farm unworked for the previous 25 years. We bought some
goats to eat down the brush around the old home-place. One of the goats
was in milk, and so before bringing the goats home we spent a couple of
weeks helping our neighbor with evening milking. Not too hard - even for
a city boy: I even learned the meaning of "she kicked the bucket".
Other expressions followed.
Turns out that while intolerant of cow's milk, Fleming had absolutely
no trouble digesting goat's milk. So the goats were bred and multiplied.
More milk than two people could drink resulted to a trip to the library,
and a book on cheesemaking. Soon the kitchen was full of gallon glass
jars containing marvelous biology experiments. (Hint - if the curd
floats like ivory soap - throw it to the chickens.) Some of the cheese
tasted OK. Other people tried and liked it. Nobody died.
 Building
the Dairy -
In 1989 we decided to build a dairy and make cheese commercially. Thanks
to the foresight of North Carolina's Department of Agriculture, our state
offers practical encouragement to small farmstead producers like ourselves.
But where to find "micro-dairy" equipment? (small-scale dairies
became obsolete with the completion of the Inter-state highway system,
and such equipment hasn't been manufactured since then). We got lucky
- bought a plant in Arizona, and moved it back east. The NCDA inspectors
helped us to design a building around this equipment that conformed to
sanitation rules - and we started building.
The Dairy Grows -
In 1991 with a herd of 18 goats and a new building, we got licensed.
Thus began our ongoing efforts to make consistently good cheese - and
learning to manage the many facets of herd nutrition & health, dairy
equipment operation & maintenance, developing & adapting cheesemaking
techniques to complement seasonal variations in climate and milk characteristics.
Brit had an engineering assignment in Paris that year - where he was adopted
by a French goat farmer, and learned a lot about small scale farming and
goat cheese. But that's another tale. Left with the farm, goats, and recalcitrant
equipment, Fleming worked through these startup difficulties alone.
Getting
Better all the Time -
The following 5 years brought gradual growth to our present herd of 64
does, and increasing expertise in cheesemaking. Fleming gradually developed
a basic style of cheese that satisfies her - a fresh Montrachet style
log. These are sold plain, or surface-coated with dried herbs. Garlic/Basil
is the most popular. New flavors creep in from time to time - Rosemary
was requested by one customer, and now has a small but regular following.
Variations occur: Fleming popped bits of extra cheese into the food dehydrator
- yielding small golden nuggets of intense Parmesan-like flavor; and daughter
Lea rescued a batch of yoghurt that stubbornly refused to drain by adding
herbs to make a creamy chip-dip spread - and the birth of the "Serendipity"
spreads we package in plastic deli containers. The Jalapeño version
is my favorite.
Most of our cheese is sold the same week it is made, but some occassionally
remains unsold. These few logs begin to mold-ripen, and develop a satisfying
depth and complexity of flavor. Pity there aren't more.
We've entered our cheese in somenational competitions - the American
Cheese Society's 1994 event at Shelburne Farms (VT), the 1996 conference
in Madison (WS), and the 2000 Conference in St. Helena (CA). The first
gave silver and bronze awards to our Apricot Serendipity and Garlic/Basil
log, but our plain chèvre log fared poorly. The second awarded
our plain chèvre log a first in class (still a Silver medal - but
just a half-point below the Gold threshhold). Points off were for being
"too fresh" - still had that yoghurt tang. Maybe we should have
taken a 7-day old cheese instead of a 2-day old one. Still - results we
can live with. The most recent gave us a 3rd place for our mold-ripened
ash-coated pyramid, but failing grades for the fresh chevre. (it didn't
help that UPS lost our cheese entries in the heat of August in a Napa
Valley warehouse for 2 days - after that I'm simply glad nobody died from
tasting it).
Fleming has little enthusiasm for competitions, and puts greater value
on the opinions of farm market customers and local area chefs. They tell
us we're still getting better.
On
an Even Keel -
Celebrity Dairy is now on a plateau: making all the cheese that 2 people
can comfortably handle, and approaching building capacity for animals
and hay storage. Our efforts now are focused upon making work more efficient:
converting from multiple free-standing refrigerators/freezers to walk-ins,
putting wheels under all equipment to reduce lifting/carrying, and so
forth. Hopefully this year we'll start using the pipeline milking system
- and letting a milk pump put us out of the job of lugging 50 pound milk
cans around. Fleming has stepped back from the outdoors work at the dairy
- leaving the animals to Brit, or people he finds to help. She has had
some wonderful interns here to help and learn, and has given more of her
time to cooking and recipe development in the Inn. Perhaps a cookbook
will be forthcoming.
Over the Horizon -
In Spring of 1998 one of our farm market customers asked Fleming how
long she was going to keep making cheese, and she replied that she wanted
to retire in 5 years (age 65), and turn it over to somebody else who would
be interested in taking the business to the next level. I was jolted by
this: we're normally too busy with day to day work to give much thought
to the year 2003, although we ought to. Our immediate market is far larger
than our current production - so the growth potential is real.
But if we actively imagine the future, it will happen. Part of this will
be a younger partner. How will this play out? Pehaps we'll find an intern
who wants to make a life of this, or somebody who's middle-age crisis
runs towards dairy farming instead of sportcars. (Improbable you say?
Brit got tired of going to committee meetings, and build a B&B Inn.
Now he has to run it). Check back in a few years. In the meantime, we're
still milking goats and making cheese.
Next Millenium Update -
So OK - now its 2002 - we're still making cheese at about the same level:
at most 64 goats and the milk/cheese that they can produce. I (Brit) am
now a full-time farmer/innkeeper, and have relieved Fleming of the physical
work with the animals, but she's still the principal cheesemaker and marketer
of our cheese. We've had several apprentices - ranging from wonderful
to awful, but haven't yet hit upon anybody who is crazy enough to want
to make a life out of what we are doing (and believe me - it is a life).
Fleming still holds to retiring at 65 - now just a year away. Will we
close the place, will Brit try to take on the whole thing, or will Bill
Gates decide he's had enough of technology, and decide to downsize and
become a goat farmer? If so, we've got a nice house to sell him. Stay
tuned. .
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