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12 The Cheese Guide 12 The Cheese Guide long road home to cheese the attention of a wider market. The Moon Hill cheeses include Alpenbert, a Camembert-Brie-style cheese that Weibel's been making for about a decade; Cumin Gouda, which is aged for six months before sale; Joe, a coffee-rubbed California-style Dry Jack aged for six months before sale; a Straight Tomme that they're washing with a milk stout from Lefthand brewery that's aged for six months to a year and Elkhorn Asiago, which is an Asiago-style cheese with peppercorns that's aged for six months. Weibel has taken an unusual route to get to this point in his life. He started out in Longmont, Colorado, a rural town at the base of Colorado's Front Range of the Rocky Mountains that's the hub of his family's car dealership business. He figures he started out in the car business by washing trash cans after church on Sundays from the time he wasn't much more than a toddler. By the time he'd gotten his college education in economics, it was only natural that he'd go into the car business himself. "I worked my way through all the departments, helped manage a struggling car dealership as it was sold off, bought into the Dodge store in Boulder," he says. "After taking that dealership from about 50 cars a month to 200, I came to the realization that I really did not enjoy what I was doing. Putting people into debt to make my living really did not sit well with me." Growing up in rural Colorado, he'd always felt deep-down that what he really wanted was to live on a farm, producing food. Or maybe he could make a living in the renewable energy business, he thought. "I put a pin in my home town (Longmont) and drew a circle around it, looking for a property that would work for either," he says. While he was looking around for an opportunity, he met a nice couple who knew how to run a cattle ranch but didn't have enough BY LORRIE BAUMANN Steamboat Springs, Colorado, is best-known, to the people who've heard of it at all, for the quality of the champagne powder snow that draws skiers to the Rocky Mountains each winter. For John Weibel, it's been a place to leave behind his family heritage in the car business and try to make a living harvesting sunshine and turning it into cheese. Weibel is the Owner and Cheesemaker at Moon Hill Dairy, and after two years of making his farmstead cheeses on a commercial scale and selling them regionally, he and Head Cheesemaker Laura Chisholm are ready to bring Moon Hill's European-style cheeses to