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dairy 6 The Cheese Guide BY LORRIE BAUMANN For 62 years, the Bandon Cheese factory drew tourists into its tiny community on the southern Oregon coast. The town of Bandon is 4.5 hours away from Portland and a couple of hours from Eugene – although it's a lovely little seaside village, it's not a place you're likely to wander to by accident. But tourists did come to the town's yearly cranberry festival and when they stopped in Bandon as they toured Oregon's magnificent coastline, they also came to visit the cheese factory, where they were invited to watch the cheesemaking and buy some of its famous cheddar. The factory also made a weekend outing for local families – for some, it was a family tradition to take their children and grandchildren to visit the same cheese factory that they'd visited when they were children and it was making 1,000-pound cheddar wheels to feed World War II soldiers. For others, it was just a convenient place to buy a cheese they valued partly because they liked the taste and partly because they were able to buy it for a good price. That stopped when the Tillamook County Creamery Association bought the plant in 2000 and abandoned it in 2002 to move production for the Bandon Cheese brand to a larger Tillamook facility where the cheese could be made more economically. As Oregon State University Professor and Dairy Processing Extension Specialist Lisbeth Goddik points out, that was just before the artisan cheese movement began to take off, and Americans were still thinking about cheese's value mostly in terms of its price tag in the grocery store. "It has been an exciting, but sometimes a hard journey to follow," she said. Oregon's cheesemakers are challenged by its geography as well as its economy. The state is surrounded by California, Idaho and Washington. California is the nation's largest producer of fluid milk, and it's the second-largest producer of cheese, behind Wisconsin. Idaho is the country's third-largest dairy state, and Washington's dairy production is 2.6 times bigger than Oregon's, according to Goddik. "We are among giants here on the West Coast," she said. "If a cheesemaker in Oregon was to make an average cheese, they would not survive." Portland is Oregon's largest urban market, but it's smaller than Seattle, Washington, to its north and San Francisco, California, to its south, and it's not as wealthy as either of its neighbors. Oregon cheesemakers need to make a product that appeals in Seattle and San Francisco to survive in business – the cheese has to taste good and it has to be able to travel. "Mediocrity is death in Oregon," Goddik said. "In larger states, maybe you can get away with not being spectacular because you have an audience of buyers. We don't." Tillamook eventually demolished the facility in 2005, leaving a vacant lot that was compared soon after to a "missing front tooth exposed by a sad lonely smile." Bandon's citizenry immediately began lobbying the local government to bring another cheese plant into town, according to Amy Ross Strong, who reported on the matter for the Bandon Western World newspaper. She called the vacant lot where the cheese plant had been an eyesore. The vacant lot was still there when Daniel Graham and Greg Drobot came to town to work on a local condominium development, but the times had changed around it. Graham was in Oregon among GIANTS Lisbeth Goddik

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