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The Cheese Guide 13 regularly. "The way I see it, both those things are legal right now," he said. "I get the sense from the regulators that even though it's legal, they still don't want it out there, so there's extra scrutiny.... I definitely feel more than pressure." Plastic aging racks and pasteurized milk would ease that scrutiny, but Glustoff remains committed to his traditional ways of making cheeses, and his third- party audits and inspections by teams from major retailers back up his confidence that he's chosen the right path. "They're pretty serious when they [retailers] send out their own teams. When you pass that, you know you're doing pretty well.... Our sales haven't suffered as a result of that," he said. "If we don't find the right balance between staying true to your values, with respect to raw milk and wood boards, and meeting state and federal requirements – because I'm not saying that someone like myself should just be able to do whatever we want – if the federal and state requirements are so difficult to achieve, many of the foods we enjoy will disappear." Harvest Moon is one of 5 Spoke Creamery's flagship cheeses, a title it shares with Tumbleweed. Harvest Moon is the Mimolette- style cheese that he started making about two years ago from a Mimolette recipe that he's adjusted slightly. Glustoff started making it with the intention that he'd sell it after a year of aging, but demand for it has been so intense that he now sells it at both six months and a year. "I've just been wrong about the demand all along," he said. "It's well received at six months. We're hoping to get to a point where we have enough inventory to offer it just at a year." Tumbleweed has been around longer. It's the cross between a young Cantal and an aged Cheddar, a semi-hard cheese with a brown butter aroma. "It' a Cheddar type of cheese aged more than 12 months," Glustoff said. "It's a top seller, very popular in restaurants like Per Se." Porter is based on a Tomme de Savoie and it's mold-ripened in the same aging room with Tumbleweed for a shorter time, which leaves it with its semi-soft consistency and the grassy flavors characteristic of its style. "Its peak is at three to five months," Glustoff said. "The sweet spot is three and a half to four and a half months." 5 Spoke Creamery makes other cheeses that are packaged for sale at retail – about 60 percent of the 90,000 to 100,000 pounds of cheese that Glustoff makes in a year goes to foodservice, with the other 40 percent sold nationally at retail. "We're just starting to do a little export," Glustoff said. "We're putting together our first order." The Cheese Guide 13

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