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OCG Show Daily 9 Monday, June 11, 2018 Long Road Home to Cheese By Lorrie Baumann Steamboat Springs, Colorado, is best- known, to the people who've heard of it at all, for the quality of the cham- pagne 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 farm- stead 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 the atten- tion 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 cof- fee-rubbed California-style Dry Jack aged for six months before sale; a Straight Tomme that they're washing with a milk stout from Lefthand brew- ery 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 fami- ly's car dealership business. He fig- ures 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 educa- tion 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 realiza- tion 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 money to get into the business, and they decided to partner up. Weibel started looking for a cattle ranch. "After getting involved part time, learning about what we were doing and going through a holis- tic management course with Keith and Wendi, I decided I wanted to do it full time. I also felt that it was a good time to get out of the car business, econom- ically," he says. "I realized that I could make a big difference in the health of my consumers, the people who gener- ally could not afford to do this on their own (without being born into a farm- ing family) and the environment (if the cattle are grazed properly)." After a while, though, it started eating away at him that you can't make beef without killing cows, and he didn't really want to be in the busi- ness of death. "I don't want to raise beef for slaughter," he says. "My goal is a world of life. No herbicides or pesticides." He and his wife, Blair, decided to go to Cal Poly and learn how to make cheese, and then they started thinking out their exit from the cattle ranching business. "I leased out the previous farm in 2010 to be purchased in 2013, so I thought, and found a small parcel of land outside of Steamboat Springs, to move my operation to," he says. "There used to be 70 or 80 dairies in the valley, but they shut down in the '70s when the ski areas grew." He settled in, started a herd that's now 27 milking cows, mostly Brown Swiss with some Guernsey and Jersey and a tiny bit of Angus for hardiness that helps them thrive at 7,000 feet in a climate that might bring a couple of months without rain in the summer and then frosts that bring grazing sea- son to an early end. He built a milk house and started making cheese on a microscopic scale. "I wanted to make a cheese that was exported to France — it was that good," he says. He built a state-of-the-art cream- ery, and then he started coming to grips with the realization that trying to make a farmstead cheese as a one-man operation is a pretty good way to work yourself to death, even if you're only milking once a day. He put a two-line help wanted ad on the American Cheese Society's website and hoped for relief. Laura Chisholm answered the call. "She had a job lined up in Michigan, starting up a creamery for someone up there, and she'd had mis- givings about it. She drove out and visited me the week before Thanksgiving and was working for me the week after Thanksgiving," he says. "It takes a team of two to five people. Two is too small, in my experience. It takes three to four people growing the grass, producing nutrient-dense foods for the herd, which produces nutrient- dense food for humans; then you have the cheesemaking, and you have mar- keting and distribution. ... I've done this so long that I'm at the point of exhaustion, but I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think we'll turn a profit this month."