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The Cheese Guide 21 another cheese for the Red Barn milk. "He suggested New Zealand Cheddar as a model for the Red Barn," Terry said. "That style lets the natural grass flavors come through the Cheddar. We agreed that was a perfect fit." New Zealand's prized Cheddar cheeses are typically made from unpasteurized milk from grass-fed cows, with flavors produced by a particular cocktail of local lactobacilli cultures, and coagulated with animal rennet. Once the Center for Dairy Research had developed a recipe for the cheese that was to be called Edun White Cheddar, the Homans asked Jon Metzig to make it for them at Willow Creek Creamery. Metzig is a fourth-generation cheesemaker who grew up working at his family's cheese plant and eventually became the youngest Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker in the state's history. Jointly sponsored by the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research, the University of Wisconsin's Extension Service and the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, the Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker Program requires its applicants to have held a Wisconsin cheesemaker license for a minimum of 10 years before they can qualify to embark on a three-year training program and apprenticeship that ends in a rigorous written examination, and finally, certification as a Master Cheesemaker for a particular variety of cheese. Applicants may certify in only two types of cheese each time they go through the program. Jon Metzig is certified as a Master Cheesemaker for Cheddar and Colby cheeses. He makes Edun in 40-pound blocks for Red Barns on demand as the orders for the cheese come in. "We schedule that as needed on a per month basis. Sometimes in the busy season, there might be several days," Terry said. "It depends on our orders and his schedule. We accommodate each other's needs." Then the Homans went back to the Center for Dairy Research with a request for a recipe for a unique American cheese. The result was Cupola, which has the sweet caramel flavor of a Gouda at the front, followed by the long tangy finish of a Parmesan. It's often thought to resemble a Piave, a classic Italian cow milk cheese with a Protected Designation of Origin near the Piave River in the Dolomites region. "Cupola is just a really versatile cheese. It's great with a glass of wine, but you can grate it," said Paula. "It melts beautifully." For this cheese, the Homans asked Katie Fuhrmann, the Head Cheesemaker at her family's LaClare Farms, to lend her skills. Most recently, Red Barn brought out a Monterey Jack in 2016 that's made by the Hintz family at Springside, and then went back to Metzig to make Le Rouge, which was introduced in limited release in 2016. It's a washed-rind alpine-style cheese with a reddish-orange edible rind made from an original recipe and aged eight to nine months before sale. "When you taste it, it's reminiscent of a French Comte," Terry said. "It hearkens back to the traditions of our Red Barn Family Farms." Once the Homans had a couple of small family farmers signed up and delivering their milk in early 2008, Terry and Paula started going out to supermarkets to offer Dixie-cup samples. It turned out that they were right – consumers were indeed willing to pay more for delicious milk. This is where cheese starts to wedge its way into the story, because while some consumers were willing to pay a premium for better milk, that was still a niche market, and by midsummer of 2008, the cows in the program were flooding it with an extremely perishable product. For the past several thousand years, cheese has been a known solution to that dilemma. The Homans turned to the Hintz family for help. Wisconsin leads the nation in cheese production, accounting for 26 percent of all U.S. production, so it was no minor coincidence that the Hintz family was making some good cheeses at their Springside Cheese creamery just up the road in Oconto Falls. Springside uses small batch production to make custom orders for Cheddars, Colby, Colby Jack and Monterey Jack cheeses and has several American Cheese Society and U.S. Championship Cheese Contest awards to its credit, including three awards for bandaged Cheddars, the most recent a second-place award in the class from the 2015 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest. The Hintz family agreed to make Cheddar cheeses from the Red Barn milk for the Homans to sell under their new company's brand name, and Red Barn Family Farms was in the cheese business. "We started with Cheddars. The bandaged Heritage Weis was the starting point," Terry said. "We chose that because we think it's the perfect complement to our family farms, the heritage of the bandaged wheel and the handmade care with which they're made." Since then, the Red Barn Family Farms' line of Heritage Weis Cheddars, which are bandaged wrapped 13-pound midget wheels, and its Heritage White Cheddars, which are made from the same recipe in 40-pound blocks, have won 16 awards in the past six years at the U.S. Cheese Championship and the World Cheese Championships. "In 2012 at the World Cheese Championship, our bandaged Cheddars actually swept the category for bandaged Cheddars," Terry said. With that success, the Homans asked John Jaeggi at the University of Wisconsin's Center for Dairy Research to suggest

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