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10 The Cheese Guide the cheesemakers and other retailers and making genuine relationships." The quality of those relationships was as apparent as the ever- present cheese at mealtimes in the ACS's tribute to its members who'd died over the year since the Society's last annual meeting, when Jeff Jirik came back to the podium to ask the community to remember their friend Steve Ehlers, who died on May 31. "This past year, we lost ACS board member Steve Ehlers from Larry's Market.... To all of you who have left us this year, thank you for your service to cheese," he said. "I just wanted to say that, Steve, you will be truly missed." It was the first of the two times during the conference that I saw this monolith of a man, a head above most of the others around him, let a tear come to his eye. Peterson was, of course, one of the people who were missing her brother. "He would have loved to see Mike Gingrich get the Lifetime Achievement Award," she said. Peterson came to Des Moines this year to judge the fresh unripened cheeses, mozzarella balls and sheep milk cheeses aged more than 60 days. She worked alongside a technical judge who examined the cheeses for defects while she judged the aesthetics of the cheeses, awarding them points for their taste, appearance and aromas – "all the unique and desirable things that make cheese great," according to John Antonelli, who chaired the judging committee this year. Just stage-managing the annual competition is a feat in itself, particularly in a year when local temperatures in Des Moines approached 100 degrees, which meant that special attention had to be paid to keeping the cheese cool while it was received and judged. This year, the Hy-Vee supermarket chain donated the use of several refrigerated trucks to help. "All 1,843 entries came in on Friday," Antonelli said. This year's contest divided the entries into 108 subcategories and produced more than 350 winners. "A record for us – pretty special," Antonelli said. For each category, the cheeses that are entered are each judged on their own merits. A technical judge starts by giving each cheese 50 points and then subtracts points for technical flaws. The aesthetic judge starts with a zero and add points for aesthetic qualities. The scores are added for a maximum of 100 points for the cheese. Then, after the scores are added up, they're arranged in order, with the top-scoring cheese awarded first place. Then the next-highest score gets a second- place award, and the next-highest after that gets third place. Tied scores are allowed for second and third, but there is only one first place. In the event that the initial judging ends with a tie for first, the judges are asked to go back and look at the top cheeses for something that makes them stand out, something that might not have been sufficiently appreciated the first time around. At this stage, points are never subtracted from a cheese's score – there's only room for a little extra appreciation and that tiny half-point that elevates one cheese among all its competitors. This year, though, something unexpected happened: the contest broke its own rule about allowing no tie for first place. "The competition has never had a 100-point tie before," Antonelli said. This happened in the contest's open category for soft-ripened cheeses made from cow's milk, and four cheeses entered into the category all achieved perfect scores. "Because it's open there's a wide variety of cheeses in the category," Antonelli said. "A judge scoring a 100 for Harbison (made by the Cellars at Jasper Hill) could also score a 100 for Moses Sleeper (made by the Cellars at Jasper Hill) because each of these cheeses were at their best.... It would have been insulting to the cheesemakers to ask the judges to break that tie." The four cheeses who shared that first-place award were Cellars at Jasper Hill Harbison, Cellars at Jasper Hill Moses Sleeper, MouCo Cheese Company MouCO Ashley and Sweet Rowen Farmstead Mtn. Ash. Then, in a slightly less dramatic turn, there was another first-place tie with 100-point scores, this time in the category for cheddars wrapped in cloth and aged more than 12 months. Atalanta Corporation/ Mariposa Dairy got a perfect score for Lenberg Farms Classic Reserve by Celebrity, Lindsay Bandaged Cheddar, and Cows Creamery also received a perfect score for its Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar – Aged Over 12 Months. Winning an ACS award takes a lot of luck with the right circumstances as well as a good cheese, says Andy Hatch, whose Pleasant Ridge Reserve has won its category more times than he has counted in addition to those three best of show awards. The win draws a lot of media attention as well as orders from retailers. "It doesn't guarantee you commercial success, but you step up to the plate with the bases loaded," he said. After the cheeses were judged and their scores awarded, they went back into those Hy-Vee refrigerator trucks to be stored for the Festival of Cheese, an event-ending fundraiser for the American Cheese Society's American Cheese Education Foundation. The Foundation supports "educational opportunities for all those interested in producing, marketing, selling and appreciating North America's artisan, farmstead, and specialty cheeses." For Seana Doughty, the co-Founder and Cheesemaker of Bleating Heart Cheese, her second-place tie in the best of show category was a vindication. I first met her in 2015, during a trip to northern California to talk with cheesemakers there about how they were handling California's drought, a water shortage that could turn out to be the reality they're dealing with for the foreseeable future even though the climatologists aren't sure yet if it's a matter of normal cyclic weather patterns, to be broken by a season or two of good rains, or a symptom of global climate change. She was dealing with that on top of another problem – she'd had to recall her entire production from 2014 after the federal Food and Drug Administration found Listeria monocytogenes in samples of the creamery's cheeses and then delayed informing her of the problem

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