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20 The Cheese Guide BY LORRIE BAUMANN Steve and Kim Duty's customers at Denver's Cheese + Provisions love the funk, and Owner/Cheesemonger Steve Duty loves them right back. "Every [Denver] neighborhood seems to have its favorite categories. The neighborhood I'm in seems to really love washed rinds and blues, which is a cheesemonger's dream," he said. "Here, the funkier the cheese, the more interested the folks are." "We've had to trim back the Alpine collection because our customers want the funky stuff," added Co-owner Kim. The couple opened their 940 square-foot shop in the Sunnyside neighborhood of northwest Denver on December 15, 2015, just in time for the last bit of the winter holiday trade, after construction delays that finally forced them to cram about six weeks of work into the last two and half weeks before opening. They slept in the store a few of those last few nights just to get that extra 15 minutes of sleep, then opened to greet a rush of customers who'd been waiting for a specialty cheese shop to open in their neighborhood. "We opened with a bang and had amazing sales all the way through January, and it put us on a solid financial footing," Kim said. "It was worth it, but I don't necessarily recommend it." "We've been really very happy with the reception we've gotten from our neighborhood and from the city at large," she added. The couple, married now for 25 years, took the road less traveled to both their cheese shop and to Denver itself. Steve started working in restaurants right out of high school, then attended the Culinary Institute of America to gain his credentials as a chef. Then he did what young chefs then and now frequently do right after graduation from CIA – he headed for New York to stage. From the New York restaurant scene he made a brief stop in Arkansas to help with a family restaurant and then worked for many years in Washington, D.C. From there, he decided to pursue his love of controlled fermentation and ended up getting a job as the winemaker and general manager at a Virginia winery. He spent five years at the winery, with Kim acting as the part-time marketing director, until the winery's owners discovered the truth of the old saying that if you want to make a small fortune with a winery, the way to do that is to start with a big fortune. By that time, Steve and Kim had had enough experience of the countryside to know they wanted to stay on the land. "At one point, I said, 'If you wanted to do something of your own, what would it be?' He said, 'It's always been cheese,'" Kim tells the story. So, naturally, they bought a 25-acre farm and started a sheep dairy. "He turned me into a foodie very deliberately over the years," the story continues. "My passion is the people and the animals. He comes to it through the food first, and I come to it through the farm and the animals and what the people are doing." That part of the story ends just about the way you're already starting to suspect. "We were not good sheep farmers. It's just too difficult to take those cute lambs to slaughter. And you really do need kids to make it work!" Kim said. They operated the sheep dairy into 2007, when they decided to get away from that hard, hard life for a while and take off for Nepal to celebrate Kim's 40th birthday with a hike to the Mount Everest Base Camp. The Himalayas have always been a place for spiritual reflection and self-discovery. What Steve and Kim discovered was that they wanted to stay near the mountains after they'd returned home to the U.S. funk purveys the

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