Products » Show Notes » Sep 14, 2010

By all accounts at this year’s annual conference of the American Cheese Society, domestically made cheeses are alive and well and are turning out in record numbers. Blue skies prevailed over Seattle as hundreds of cheesemakers, cheesemongers, scientists, chefs and journalists converged August 25-26 to celebrate American cheeses, the competition for which set an all-time record with over 1400 cheeses entered for judging. The seminars and workshops, the workhorses of the conference, were timely and expertly organized. They covered a range of topics including cheesemaking demonstrations, dressing a cheese case, peering inside the mind of a cheese buyer, food safety, social networking, and conversations about raw milk issues, tasting, finance and customer service. Congratulations to the co-chairs, Kurt Dammeier of Beecher’s Handmade Cheese and author Sasha Davies for putting together the conference, and to President David Gremmels of Rogue Creamery who, during the conference, passed the presidential torch to Vice-President Christine Hyatt. Congratulations also to John Greeley of Sheila Marie Imports who was bestowed with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the ACS and to the world of cheese in general.

Seattle is clearly a food town, an important distinction for an ACS venue, and when one considers the Pacific Northwest as a whole, it is truly a Cheese-a-Topia, which just happens to be the theme of this year’s conference. There were several highlights of this cheese-y gathering, starting off with the Meet the Cheesemakers event on Thursday night that featured – as the name implies – a dizzying array of some of the country’s best cheesemakers and their products. For example, I was reminded how much I love Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Uplands Cheese, which incidentally won Best of Show on Saturday. Redolent of classic Gruyere, or perhaps more specifically Beaufort, one of my favorite cheeses on the planet, Reserve is a nutty, earthy cheese that is equally splendid for cooking and snacking. Uplands Cheese also represents everything I believe about dairy farming and farmstead cheesemaking – a commitment to sound animal husbandry, a respect for the soil, the seasons, and the natural cycle of the cows that give birth in the spring and give hormone-free milk throughout the summer and fall.

Many states were represented at the event. Wisconsin, of course, whose 98 ribbons outnumbers all others, and includes the aforementioned Best of Show awarded to Uplands Cheese, was represented in force. As the largest cheesemaking body in the country, and with the resources and prestige of their Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker program, “America’s Dairyland” is always among the top contenders at cheese competitions around the world, including this one. Others represented were cheesemaking giants like Vermont, California, Texas, Washington and Oregon, as well as states like Iowa, Colorado, Montana and Virginia, all of which have noble agricultural heritage, but with the exception of Maytag Blue in Iowa, none are states immediately associated with cheesemaking. Obviously, that is changing.

Other highlights of the 27th Annual ACS Conference included the opening reception at the beautiful Seattle Aquarium where, situated on a pier overlooking Puget Sound, the crowd feasted on a cheese-inspired dinner sponsored by the Dairy Farmers of Oregon, and a business lunch sponsored by Foods of Québec with a menu developed by Chef Paul Little of the Westin Hotel Montréal, in which members were brought up to date on the activities of the various committees of ACS. Why Québec? Because next year’s ACS Conference will be held in beautiful Montréal, Canada (“Paris without the jetlag”), and if the cheeses served at the luncheon were any indication, it will be a very good venue indeed. For information about next year’s conference or about becoming a member, please visit www.cheesesociety.org. And for more on this year’s event, see “Case & Counter” in our October issue.