Broth, Barnyard, Broccoli: The Nuances of Tasting Cheese!

One of the most important (and delicious) parts of cheesemaking is tasting the cheese! We taste each batch of cheese at specific moments in their aging process. This allows us to understand how the cheese is developing, follow up on any trials and notes from that particular cheese make, decide how we will age it, when we’ll wrap it, and finally, when to send it out into the world.

Every week, our tasting team gathers in the creamery for this very important task. In preparation, someone on our team collects samples of all the cheeses on that week’s tasting list and arranges them according to type of cheese and in order of youngest to oldest. When tasting multiple types of cheese in a tasting, we taste in a particular order - Savage 1st, Mt. Alice 2nd, Mad River Blue 3rd - so that we can pick up on the subtle nuances and flavors of each batch (and not blast our taste buds with blue before the subtler flavors of Savage!). With each type of cheese we taste the youngest batches first, ramping up flavors as we move down the line of age!

Now comes the fun part… tasting! When tasting cheese we use ALL OUR SENSES to get the most information possible (well, except for our sense of hearing). The first thing we do is LOOK and FEEL the sample piece. What does the rind look like, the paste, the color? How does it feel in your fingers? We then SMELL the cheese. While our taste buds are responsible for detecting the 5 main flavors of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, our noses can distinguish over one trillion aromas!! Put another way, food would taste rather lackluster if we did not have our olfactory senses intact.

After we finish taking in the aroma, we put the cheese in our mouths and TASTE it, taking time to roll it around on our tongue and chew it before swallowing. At this stage we can assess the flavors of the cheese. There are innumerable flavors our senses can pick up on - and the more you practice, the more specific flavors & aromas you can identify! Here are some examples of descriptors of our cheeses (some are complements, some are criticisms, but all are helpful information): mushroom, butter, soy sauce, new shoe, cream, charred asparagus, horse blanket, fresh broccoli, powdered cheese packet, papaya, compost, salami, brothy, mineral, anise, bacon fat, barnyard….. And on and on and on! Each cheese has a target flavor profile, so getting specific with the flavors and aromas we’re noticing is an integral part of rating quality and directing the rest of the cheeses’ life.

During the whole tasting, we’re also keeping records. We look back at make sheets, noting possible connections between milk quality, pH and moisture, the cheese make process, affinage, and what we’re tasting. From there, it’s decision making and back to tending to & making cheese!