Oser Communications Group

The Cheese Guide 11 local Freestone, California is a tiny town with about 50 residents in at the intersection of Bohemian Highway and Bodega Highway in Sonoma County. It's home to the Freestone Country Store, Wild Flour Bakery, the Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary, the Joseph Phelps Winery and Freestone Artisan Cheese. Omar Mueller, who owns Freestone Artisan Cheese says, "If you're going to be stuck somewhere, this is not a bad place to be stuck. The weather's pretty nice. I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio. I love my family in Cleveland, but I like it here.... I get the coolest people through here – people from all over the world." Mueller opened his 900-square food store in May, 2013 after he decided that he could make better use of his MBA and his retail experience he got working at Whole Foods while he was getting that MBA by selling cheese rather than making it. He'd gotten interested in making cheese while he was working at Whole Foods, and he'd tried that for a while in a rented creamery, then reached a point at which he decided that if he was going to keep making cheese, he'd need a creamery of his own. The state of his finances and the northern California real estate market gave him a choice, though: he could either invest in a creamery or he could buy a store, but he couldn't do both. He decided to buy the shop. "In that process, I decided I was better placed to do retail and focus on local cheesemakers," he says. Then in 2011, he got the opportunity to buy the building where his cheese shop is now located. "It was right next to my home," he says. These days, he's got a double cooler and a merchandising cooler from which he offers about 50 cheeses at any given time as well as some charcuterie and the crackers for a nice cheese board or a picnic, some local olive oils from Sebastopol and the Sacramento area, a small selection of imported pastas, some local chocolates and some local jams. "There are a lot of people out here who are starting small businesses fermenting things like kvass or kefir water. Anything that's made local, I'll carry it," he says. "Also I do crepes – buckwheat and regular crepes that I make in the store. It keeps it kind of interesting." He also sells the water buffalo gelato from Andrew Zlot's Double 8 Dairy in West Petaluma. "The water buffalo gelato. Gotta have that," he says. His cheese cases carry mostly local northern California cheeses, but the selection also includes a few good Goudas from Europe and some Swiss village cheeses like Vacherin, which he says he carries because Americans aren't making Vacherin-style cheeses. "The closest thing is Alpha Tolman from Jasper Hill," he says. "I keep it pretty focused. I mainly sell American artisan cheeses. Most of them are local, then I've got things like Jasper Hill, which you have to have.... I pick and choose things that I hear about across the country." in Freestone, California keeping it BY LORRIE BAUMANN

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