Advanced Cheesemaking Class - Blue Cheese

River Whey Creamery is offering an Advanced Cheesemaking Class with Owner and Founder, Susan Rigg. This class will be conducted in two sessions. The first session will be for four and a half hours in the creamery as we make a batch of aged blue cheese. We will go through all of the steps from bringing the milk to the correct temperature for the cultures, adding cultures, renneting, inoculating the milk with blue mold, the fermentation and pH measurements, cutting curds, and then hooping and pressing. While waiting between steps, we will taste a variety of blue style cheeses from around the world. We will be discussing the history of these kinds of cheeses as well as specific ingredients important for making blue cheese.

Each participant will be allowed to pack their curds to form their own wheels which will be marked. River Whey will then age the cheeses in our temperature and humidity controlled state-of-the-art cheese caves for approximately two months. Our class-made batch of blue cheese will yield twenty two wheels of approximately two and a half pounds each (with plenty for tasting on Harvest Day, and each participant will take home two of their own wheels - approximately 5 pounds of blue cheese).

On the Friday evening of the Harvest Day all of the participants will be invited back to the creamery to hand harvest their own marked wheel, and clean them up for packaging. We will serve wine and accompaniments and taste our one wheel from the batch to see how our cheeses have matured. Each participant will then take home their own wheel of hand made blue cheese to share with their family and friends.

See drop down menu below for available dates. The first date is the the day of the hands on class and the second date is the day of the Harvest Celebration. Class size is limited to ten participants.

Class times: Sunday Make Day - 10:30 am to 3 pm & Harvest Days are Friday from 6:30 pm to 9 pm