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Cellars at Jasper Hill - In the Press
Monday, 23 August 2010 19:31
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Thursday, 04 June 2009 04:19
Cave Men
Jasper Hill affineurs mine a new vein for Vermont's farm-and-cheese connection
Six years ago, in a seemingly simple deal, Vermont cheese titan Cabot Creamery asked a small artisan start-up, Jasper Hill Farm of Greensboro, for help in aging a batch of cheese.
Cabot was looking to get in on the emerging artisan cheese market, and Jasper Hill Farm was keen to join forces with a large partner. Jasper Hill ripened 188 wheels of cheese for Cabot, then both sides waited for the money to roll in.
Nearly a year later, five wheels had been sold. Cabot was a prestigious brand with mass market clout; clearly something wasn’t working.
So Jasper Hill gave it a try. The farm’s owners — two brothers in their 30s, Andy and Mateo Kehler — tapped into their much smaller but niche customer base that includes natural food cooperatives throughout Vermont and high-end cheese shops in New York City. “We sold it all in 10 days,” Mateo says.
A light went on at Jasper Hill — and a new model in Vermont’s farm-and-cheese connection began to take shape.
Jasper Hill realized it could accept cheese from others and be the affineur, or ager, and then take it to market. If they could do it for Cabot, they could do it for small farms all over northeastern Vermont. It would bring farmers a much-needed higher return than they would get for liquid milk, and it would take the costly procedure of aging out of the equation. “The partnership with Cabot was instrumental in helping us to think big about what was possible,” Mateo says (and it also paved the way for Cabot Clothbound Cheddar to become a national award-winning cheese).
Monday, 01 December 2008 00:00
Two brothers embark on a winning path
Crafting a lush cheese with bark and beer
by Janet Fletcher
For adults, memories of youth often conjure a beloved summer place — a park, camp, or swimming hole where most of the good times occurred. For Mateo and Andy Kehler, brothers with deep family roots in Vermont, childhood summers unfolded at the state’s scenic Caspian Lake in Greensboro, on a section of shore known as Winnimere.
“My family has been summering at Winnimere since the early 1900s,” says Mateo. But in the late 1990s, with dot-com fortunes driving up property values in the area, the brothers began to worry. “We were looking at being priced out of the happy place of our childhood.” Determined to own their own piece of this vacation paradise, the brothers bought a derelict dairy farm near the lake a decade ago. Five years later, they had released the first cheeses from Jasper Hill Farm and soon devised one they christened “Winnimere.”
Saving the Farm
Initially, the brothers had no clue what to do with the 240-acre parcel they bought, but they knew the venture would require a new business model. All around them, dairy farms were closing. “If we were going to make it work, we were going to need to add value to the milk on the farm,” says Mateo. “There was just no chance we could possibly make it shipping milk.”