Oser Communications Group

8 The Cheese Guide where the wheels of washed-rind cheeses are working their magic smells like turnips, but sometimes it smells more like over-ripened mango. Chang can tell by the smell if the affineur has skipped a day with the washing. In the aging room for natural rind cheeses, she sometimes smells hay. "That's terroir," she said. "Sometimes I smell celery." She makes a total of 27 to 30 different cheeses, including a Gouda that she's still testing. That's a lot of cheeses for one creamery to make – and even for two – and although the array makes it possible for Haystack Mountain to offer its local market a wide variety of cheeses, it complicates the logistics of sourcing the milk, cream and cultures for all of them. "It's a double-edged sword that Jackie has the versatility to make all those cheeses. It's neat to be able to go to a market and say that for almost any taste they want, we have a cheese," Hellmer said. "It just requires more effort." They simplify some of the logistics by using only microbial rennet for all of the cheeses, which cuts down on the chance that someone in the cheese room is going to reach for the wrong rennet during the make, but it also presents some technical challenges for the aged cheeses. "It's easy to get bitter flavors from the microbial rennet if you don't know what you're doing," Hellmer said. "It does take more knowledge and skill and discipline.... It's easier to do it that way than have people trying to make a decision about the rennet." Goat milk cheeses are made seasonally in the summer – a total of about 250,000 pounds a year. Of all her cheeses, Chang prefers the goats. Her body tolerates them better than cow milk cheeses, the milk is more interesting to work with, and she feels that the flavors of the goat milk cheeses are more sophisticated and nuanced. Chang also makes cow milk cheeses with organic cow milk from Aurora Dairy, so that the creamery can stay busy year-round. "We make cow cheese just to keep good employees," Chang said. "That's the only reason we make cow cheese – to keep the good employees so they don't quit." As a result, Haystack Mountain's 11-member staff includes two people who've been there more than 10 years and another few who've been there more than five years. It's particularly important for the creamery to keep a consistent staff because the goat milk that makes the cheeses that Chang prefers to make comes from a dairy at the Colorado Correctional Institution that's staffed primarily by inmates. Haystack Mountain pays fair market value for the goat milk, and it's the only available supply in Colorado, Hellmer said. Turnover in the inmate staff, though, guarantees some inconsistencies in the quality of milk that Haystack Mountain's tanker truck picks up at the prison. "It's just like if you're making cheese and you keep changing the cheesemaker – it's going to be inconsistent," Chang said. Each load of milk is tested when it arrives at the creamery, but by the time the results come back from the laboratory, it's already been made into cheese, so the raw milk cheeses are tested again at 60 days, which is the earliest they can legally be sold. "We go through lots of tests before we release a batch of raw milk cheese because we're just not in control of the milk supply," Chang said. "With raw milk you're at the mercy of the care that the goats have had, what they've been eating." It was that inconsistency that led to the development of Gold Hill, which is made from pasteurized milk, Hellmer said. "Jackie and I knew there were times when the milk quality just wasn't good enough for raw milk cheese. There were cultures she could add that would give it some additional flavors," he said. "Then we aged it, and it turned out to be a pretty good cheese." Gold Hill is normally sold when it's six months old, but the particular wheel that the World Cheese Awards judges named "Best American Cheese" was aged for nine months. Chang entered the cheese not expecting to win any award at all – she just wanted the judges' notes. "We don't enter a lot. If we win, we win. If we don't, we don't," she said. "That was just a surprise." Before the win, Gold Hill was sold mostly to local restaurants, but publicity surrounding the award now draws a steady stream of tourists to the creamery so they can peer thorough the cheese room's windows to watch Chang stirring her vat. After their tour, they often want to buy a wedge of Gold Hill. "After we won, I started to have some confidence so we could increase production," she said. "It's a cheese we make from Colorado milk," Hellmer added, "so it's a statewide phenomenon that everyone from the state of Colorado should share – that's my point of view."

• Cover