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Restaurant Daily News Tuesday, May 22, 2018 6 4 2018 Best of Show Sweet Grass on the Green Hill Makes Great Cheese By Lorrie Baumann Sweet Grass Dairy is making a name for itself in Georgia with an award-winning line of six cheeses made from pasture- raised cow milk and traditional European methods. Sweet Grass Dairy's Thomasville Tomme won a gold sofi Award and a Good Food Award in 2018; Asher Blue won a bronze medal in the 2015 and 2009 World Cheese Awards; Green Hill, a double-cream cow milk cheese with a bloomy rind in the style of a Camembert and the dairy's best seller, is an eight-time winner at the American Cheese Society's annual Judging and Competition; and the dairy's Pimento Cheese won a first place award from the American Cheese Society in 2015. "I really, really love our Green Hill. It has really put us on the map," says Sweet Grass Dairy co- Owner Jessica Little. "I think it's a great vehicle for telling the story of grass- based milk. It's a golden yellow color, and it's mild enough to be approachable for people who didn't grow up eating fine cheese." Jessica and her husband, Jeremy Little, bought Sweet Grass Dairy from her parents, Al and Desiree Wehner, in 2005. The Wehners started Sweet Grass Dairy in 2000 after they decided that the way they'd been dairy farming for more than a decade wasn't good for their cows, their land or themselves. Their herd of Holsteins was producing high milk vol- ume, but the cows were able to produce at that volume for only an average of two to three years before they had to be retired. "The land wasn't as healthy as it needed to be. They were working 100-hour weeks," Jessica says. They decided that there had to be a better way, so Desiree signed Al up for a conference on New Zealand-style rota- tional grazing methods. In common with New Zealand, the climate in southwest Georgia, where Sweet Grass Dairy is located, has mild winters that allow for 365 days of grazing per year and Sweet Grass Dairy enjoys an unlimited water supply, so it seemed logical that the same grazing methods that work in New Zealand could also work in Thomasville. "He came back from the conference saying they were starting over," Jessica says. The couple sold their Holstein herd and, following the advice of other local dairy farmers, bought Jersey cows that hadn't had the ability to thrive on pasture bred out of them. "That was in 1993," Jessica says. "By 2000, the average lifes- pan of the cows had gone up to 12 to 14 years. They just live a much longer life because you're not pushing them for max- imum production." The couple started thinking about the best use for the milk their Jersey herd was producing, and after years of evaluating the merits of various dairy products and conducting cheesemaking experiments in the family kitchen, they settled on cheese. "Cheese was the most scientific and the most creative," Jessica says. "My mom would wake up in the middle of the night, and say, 'I want to make Gouda tomor- row.'" Jessica and Jeremy were both living in Atlanta at the time, working in restau- rants and enjoying the excitement of interest in Southern food that had blos- somed when Atlanta hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics. That event had brought many into the city who'd tasted real Southern food for the first time, and inspired many chefs to stay in Atlanta to explore the tradition and to provide a mar- ket for locally made premium cheeses that hadn't been there before. "I could walk into kitchens and just taste cheeses with chefs," Jessica says. "We were the first cheesemakers in Georgia." Some of those chefs adopted the Sweet Grass Dairy cheeses, not because they were excellent cheeses in those early days of production, but because the cheeses were local and the chefs liked the story behind them, Jessica says. "The cheese had so much potential. She was doing it for all the right reasons." By 2005, the Wehners were ready to pass the torch to a new generation and asked Jessica if she'd like to come back to the farm. Although she'd grown up on the farm, she'd been happy in the city, earning a marketing degree from Georgia State University and working in restaurants while she studied to become a sommelier. Her husband had a degree in psychology from Florida State University and was working in restaurants to earn money for more education. "When I met him, he was saving up money to go to culinary school," Jessica says. "He started realiz- ing that in order to be a great chef, you have got to understand raw ingredients – and then he just fell in love with the pro- duction end." After talking it over, the two agreed to take on the challenge, and instead of going to culinary school, Jeremy headed for Sterling College in Vermont and then to France to learn to make cheese. Since then, he's also gotten a lot of cheese- making education from his fellow cheesemakers, Jessica says. "Everyone is so genuinely kind and helpful. Jeremy Stephenson [Spring Brook Farm], you can call and say you need help, and they're so giving. Mateo Kehler [The Cellars at Jasper Hill], David Gremmels [Rogue Creamery]. We're not competing against each other. We're competing against factory-made, industrial cheeses," she says. "That's been such a beautiful thing, to see how giving and open the other cheesemakers have been." The couple is in the final stages of working with an architect on the design of a new production facility that will replace the facility built in 2000 with the expecta- tion that it would last for 10 years. In the years since then, it's been expanded here and there, but Jessica and her husband and co-Owner are excited about the potential of a new facility, not just for expanded capacity but also to upgrade both efficiency and safety. "Jeremy is so fired up. He does all the cheesemaking," Jessica says. "We hope to add new cheeses to our line-up – we've had six for a while, and it will be exciting to see what he comes up with." While Jeremy is busy making cheese, Jessica manages the dairy's vari- ous business enterprises, which now include a retail cheese shop and full-ser- vice restaurant in Thomasville's historic downtown as well as the cheese plant and dairy operation. "The cheese shop was born of my desire to interact more with our community," she says. "I'm from Thomasville, and when I was in school, I couldn't wait to leave. ... I was so tired of having no place to go where I could have a great glass of wine and a cheese board. I finally got tired of com- plaining about it and decided to create a place where I wanted to go. That was in 2010, and apparently, I wasn't alone." For the first five years with the restau- rant, which features a simple menu of items made from scratch with quality ingredients, Jessica spent most of her time there, but for the past two years, she's been concentrating on sales and marketing efforts to grow the cheese business. "It's been so fun to see our industry evolve. Atlanta's still our biggest market, but it's so fun to hit the road and tell the story of the exciting things that are going on in the South and in this part of the country," she says. "Now there's cheese made in all 50 states, and we all have something to say. It's been really exciting to see it develop over the last couple of years."