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.