River Whey Creamery is offering an Advanced Cheesemaking Class with Owner and Founder, Susan Rigg. This class will be five hours in the creamery where we will make an 80 gallon batch of aged ‘washed curd’ cheese. We will go through all of the steps from bringing the milk to the correct temperature for the cultures, adding cultures, renneting, fermentation and pH measurements, cutting curds, adding the water to wash the curds, and then hooping and pressing. While waiting between steps, we will taste a variety of washed curd style cheeses, especially Gouda and Gruyere style cheeses where this method is prevalent. We will be discussing the history of these kinds of cheeses as well as methods for making other styles of hard and semi-hard cheeses.

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 three months. Our class-made batch of semi-hard cheese will yield nine wheels of approximately seven pounds each.