Sam Rheaume: Exploring America's Artisanal Cheese Excellence at Jasper Hill Farm

As the scent of a perfectly aged cheese can transport you to the lush pastures of Vermont, our conversation with Sam Rheaume of Jasper Hill Farm will take you on a journey through the farms inner workings. The Kehler brothers' vision of preserving the rural economy through world-class cheese-making is not just a story of passion, but also one of revival and innovation.
We uncover the alchemy of grass-fed milk as it transforms into the likes of Whitney, Alpha Tolman,  Harbison, Cabot Clothbound Cheddar and the unforgettable Bayley Hazen Blue. The artistry behind these cheeses is a dance of tradition and modernism, with each wheel meticulously nurtured to perfection. Join us as we celebrate the unsung heroes of the cheese world—the mongers, the makers, and the artisans—and explore how their work enhances our dining tables and stimulate our taste buds.
Be sure to indulge in the full experience by visiting Jasper Hill Farm’s online haunts, where the dialogue about these artisanal delights continues well beyond our chat.

Thank you Sam!, the Kehler brothers and Jasper Hill Farm family!,
https://www.jasperhillfarm.com/

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Transcript

Chef Massey: 0:14

Hey everyone, welcome to Chef Sense. I'm your host, chef Massey. We have in the studio Sam Rheaume from Jasper Hill Farm. Absolutely love Jasper Hill Farm. Thank you for being here.

Sam Rheaume: 0:28

Thanks so much for having me. We have a really dreary Vermont day out the window here. You're pretty slushy.

Chef Massey: 0:35

Yeah, I know it's kind of the same here. Is this mud season or is this a joke? So, Jasper Hill, I have always been a huge fan of what you guys do. There's such a variety in this artisanal cheese movement that just continues to flourish in our country. You guys are just this epicenter of inspiration in my book. I get so much from what you guys do and profiles. It's like magic. So, yeah, can you go into what you do there at the farm and work into the history a little bit?

Sam Rheaume: 1:08

I'm on the sales side of what we do here. I do sales and marketing. I work with direct to consumer marketing. I design all of our packaging, fun campaigns I suppose, yeah, but we're a small business and we're about 100 people total. While those might be my main roles, if it's the busy season right before the holidays, I'm underground in the sellers like wrapping bark around Harbison or wrapping up wheels of Bailey Hazen Blue to go out to our customers around the country. It's a little all hands on deck while also trying to do what we do. And I guess, just some background about Jasper Hill.

Sam Rheaume: 1:53

Jasper Hill Farm and as it relates to the artisanal cheese movement in America, was born at just the right time in a lot of ways. So back in the late 90s, brothers Andy and Matteo Kehler. They had grown up visiting Greensboro, Vermont, where our sellers are located up in the Northeast Kingdom, about 25 miles south of the Canadian border. So we're up in the Tundra Highlands of Vermont, way out in the middle of nowhere. They grew up spending their summers in Greensboro and riding their bikes around, going from farm to farm, spending time with the animals, with the locals, and the place came to mean a lot to them and the bucolic beauty of Greensboro was always this sort of nexus of their imagination of where they would ideally like to spend their lives, a meaningful place with people that they love. And in the late 90s the fluid milk market was going through some heavy pressure to drop prices. So these mega farms in the Midwest were saturating the market. Farmers were having to take cut on 100 count of fluid milk and in Vermont, especially in this area, because of the sort of very terrain, herds are necessarily like 200 head or lighter, so small farms relative to like a massive operation, industrial operation that has thousands of animals. And so the Vermont dairy farmer went through a near extinction point in the late 90s, early 2000s, where the math wasn't working for a small herd.

Sam Rheaume: 3:50

Kehler Brothers saw this happening and they saw it having a dramatic impact on the landscape up here in that summer homes were being built on top of pastoral lands, right. So they got their heads together and they pooled every cent that they had and they said what can we do to bring the most value to this agricultural legacy of this landscape, in order to preserve a working landscape and not see it turned over into something that is a little more barren and lacking character and not supporting a local economy. If it's a seasonal economy the people who live up here year round they begin to suffer as well. So they used cheese as the model of how do we imbue as much value into this agricultural product. The best way to do it is to To make a fancy European style cheese that you are celebrating, that you're taking care of, you're soaking it in like labor, love, time and attention and creating this, this food that is Irrefutably outrageously delicious.

Sam Rheaume: 5:07

That's like yes crucial to what Jasper Hill is trying to do on a on an economic and social front community and economy because what they're trying to do is use cheese as a lever to help reinvigorate a rural landscape by accessing markets that have high amounts of wealth concentration right. So that that was one of the big impetuses is like we want to save our Community, we want to see the elementary school not closed and we want to do it by making the best cheese possible. So 2003 was their their first ever release. We just celebrated 20 years last year.

Chef Massey: 5:50

No, that's amazing, Congratulations, thanks. So, looking at the types of cheeses, I mean you guys have, is it, 13 different types of cheeses overall?

Sam Rheaume: 6:01

It's about to be more Fantastic. We always have an experiment going in the back of one cave or other. Yeah, we have a couple that we're excited to share with the world this year, but yeah, I think our core collection amounts to about 13 steady cheeses.

Chef Massey: 6:20

Okay, yeah, and you know, over the years of using you guys, I mean there's a cut, there's a few that I haven't, but I mean I love the Harbison, you know there's just. I mean to be honest with you, there's just not any that you guys do, it's just beautiful. You know are looking at that Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, you know even taking that rind, and like if I'm making polenta, just what's left of that rind, maybe shaving a little bit in there to get that nuttiness, and then you know, but as I'm doing my cream, putting that like you would like a parmesan wheel, or, you know, pecorino, you just save that hard end and just let it make magic in your sauce or in the polenta. I was using actually that cloth bound with this Abenaki Flower which is, you know, an indigenous in the New England area that the Abenaki Indians use, because I'm Indigenous as well.

Chef Massey: 7:08

So I try to celebrate not just my farming side of my family but my indigenous side, because it's it's just awesome. So you know, using your product, I mean it's just constant inspiration, you know. Or the Bailey Hazen. And then you guys, I think I know you said, with marketing, you do like, with your events, you do some raclette like the Alpha Tolman. Did you say something about sending that to Belgium too?

Sam Rheaume: 7:29

Yeah, yeah. So Whitney actually is our main raclette cheese these days. We designed it specifically to be like an immaculate Melter, so just to kind of like break it down. I guess for your listeners. We have, and I guess the best way to talk about this is through our sellers facility right, so back in Seven, just before you know the economy..

Chef Massey: 7:56

Yes, I remember that.

Sam Rheaume: 7:59

Yeah, the Kehler brothers. You know we're able to secure a Big loan to essentially pump a hillside full of tea and tea, blow it up, build a 22,000 square foot underground cheese bunker with seven specialized vaults for affinage or the Contrary, ration and finishing of the cheese. Those are the sellers at Jasper Hill, Cabot cloth bound actually, which does a traditional bandage style Cheddar so like what you would see with an English cheddar. That's a collaboration that With Cabot creamery that started back in 2003. They were seeing the birth of this American artisanal movement and you know they're producing much more commodity style cheddar generally. But they have Such high quality milk coming in from local farmers.

Sam Rheaume: 8:56

They wanted the opportunity to do a traditional bandage style cheddar and, like, bring Cabot into a more specialty shop setting. But they don't have the facilities to do that. So they called up a bunch of cheese makers around Vermont and we were the only ones to like, call them back and be like We'll take, you know, 50 wheels or whatever we could handle at the time of your cloth bound and we'll do all the maturation, we'll brush it, we'll age it back in 2006. It won Best of Show at the American Cheese Society Awards. So Andy and Matteo went down to the bank with a wheel of cheese and a trophy.

Chef Massey: 9:36

Oh, wow.

Sam Rheaume: 9:37

Give us some money.

Sam Rheaume: 9:38

We want to make this underground On cellars. So that was built in 2006 and really all of the styles that we make are sort of, they're part and parcel, not only to our environment, our terroir, the landscape, which we can talk about later but also Um to those vaults. So Harbison, for instance, exists in the first of our vaults, which is our bloomy rind vault. So bloomy rind, if you think of that White brie, like it's a penicillium mold, that is the major component, as well as geotrichum, some yeast as well, and that that vault has a high degree of air exchange, because those molds require a lot of oxygen to really thrive. That's a very different environment from, say, vault three, which is where Alpha Tolman and Whitney, which are alpine style cheese, right and style cheeses, like your gruyere is your comte, is your appenzellers. They have a more stagnant environment. You walk in and air feels heavier and it smells more densely of of Geolithic processes. So it's really the sellers themselves, this unique facility that we have, that gives us this ability to have a broad catalog stylistically.

Chef Massey: 10:59

Which is pretty amazing, Even looking at the outer. Like the Oma, can you describe that cheese a little bit? That's interesting.

Sam Rheaume: 11:08

Oma is another one of our collaborative cheeses. Originally we built the sellers as a means to help aggregate and help mature cheese for other cheesemakers around the state. So a lot of Vermont farms are small, they don't have access to getting their cheese onto a pallet to get into the supply chain to a distribution hub and then distributed further than maybe just our region. But we were trying to leverage the volume that we were able to do with Cabot Clothbound. We would stack a pile at three-quarters high with Cabot Clothbound and then on top we'd have other local cheeses, some of which we were helping to age, some of which we weren't. That was sort of the original goal of what we could do with the sellers and leverage a higher volume product. Like Cabot Clothbound, oma is produced at the Von Trapp Farmstead, gavin and Weitzfield, vermont. Those are the same Von Trapp's as from the Sound of Music.

Chef Massey: 12:11

Yes, Adelweiss.

Sam Rheaume: 12:13

Adelweiss.

Chef Massey: 12:16

Don't ask me why. I know that.

Sam Rheaume: 12:19

It's the wife.

Chef Massey: 12:20

It's the wife.

Sam Rheaume: 12:21

Okay, hey, I used to perform in musical theater. There's no shade here.

Chef Massey: 12:25

Well, thank you.

Sam Rheaume: 12:28

So the Von Trapp's produced that cheese down at their farmstead in Weitzfield and then they ship it up to us. It's a wash-dron cheese, so the appearance is kind of this orange with maybe a dusty overglow of like a light bloom. And that orange is from a culture known as Breva Bacterium linens. It's a bacterial culture that creates that sort of pigmentation, and they coexist along with a lot of yeast as well. So aromatically it smells more like funky, sourdough, bread-y, sometimes a little like suede.

Chef Massey: 13:09

Yes, love it, animal-y.

Sam Rheaume: 13:13

And you know a lot of folks might be a little anxious to try their first wash-dron cheese, but I would always say the bark is worse than the bite. So just by having a slight pungency aromatically on the palate, omo has just buttery, like cultured butter, complex butter, and sometimes you get a little bit of fruit or even like a cured meat kind of flavor, like a Selerai prosciutto.

Chef Massey: 13:45

Yeah, that would be great. To pair with that with some Mestarda, definitely Nice.

Sam Rheaume: 13:51

Apricots, apricots and wash-dron cheeses.

Chef Massey: 13:54

Yeah, that's what it's about. I'm talking about yeah, well, nice, and also for some of our listeners, you guys are strictly cow's milk, correct.

Sam Rheaume: 14:03

Oh well, as of 2019, we've begun to dabble elsewhere.

Chef Massey: 14:08

Okay, okay.

Sam Rheaume: 14:10

Yeah, we so. Yes, our like year-round available catalog is all cow's milk. We have a set of raw milk cheeses that are coming from a single herd. That is our own herd up in Glover, Vermont, and that herd is like a whole other story because with our own cheeses and our own raw milk cheeses we have a very high bar for milk composition as well as like just milk cleanliness, and it turns out a lot of what goes into like making a clean, well-balanced milk is land management and nutrition, herd nutrition. So we have entire facilities and teams set up to crop around a thousand acres of hayland, the sponsor today is BetterHelp.

Chef Massey: 15:03

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Chef Massey: 15:46

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Sam Rheaume: 16:13

I've got a little off topic here. The question was about milk supply.

Chef Massey: 16:22

Yeah Well, just sharing with people that are listening that you are cow's milk and it's based off of that raw milk and so on.

Sam Rheaume: 16:28

Yeah, so they're all cows, and then we have three partner farms that are all mixed breed cows. In 2019, however, we partnered with two wonderful goat farmers who are coming from the West Coast, ryan and Andy Andrus, and we facilitated the purchase of one of these old barns that went out of business in sort of late 90s and it went through a phase of attempted resuscitation, okay, but now we have about a 200 head goat herd. Their milk is primarily going into bottles, actually.

Chef Massey: 17:11

Oh, no, kidding Okay.

Sam Rheaume: 17:12

Yeah, so they have. We purchased a herd along with a bottled goat milk brand called Oak Knoll which is now distributed sort of in the Northeast and along the Eastern Latoral. Whenever we have excess goat milk, which isn't very often, but whenever we do, we have a cheese we make called Eligo, which is actually it's like Oma, it's a washdrying cheese. That's a cow goat milk blend.

Chef Massey: 17:42

Okay, okay, very nice. Wow, do you want to go through your rennet the process?

Sam Rheaume: 17:48

Yeah. So I feel like I kind of have to tie some ends together here, because the journey of a raw milk cheese is a linear. Well, it's linear, but it involves a lot of like hard work at every single stage. So all of our raw milk cheeses begin with the grass right. The real goal, what we're trying to capture is like the richness of that summer sun as it soaks into the grass. The cow eats it, it concentrates that flavor, it captures a lot of terroir, both in the types of vegetation it's eating, but also the microbes that are off of the land onto the cows utter and make their way into the milk and actually do provide positive attributes to our raw milk cheese. That whole system of pasturing cows like getting them onto grass, but also making sure they have that good, high quality grass through the winter to produce continually delicious milk is a whole cropping operation that's led by this badass farmer, can I?

Chef Massey: 18:53

cuss, I'm sorry, absolutely.

Sam Rheaume: 18:55

This badass farmer, ellie Searles and her team, and they're doing a ton to like sink carbon back into the landscape biodeversed pastures and really diverse feed for when the cows winter so that grass gets concentrated into this like very rich, dynamic milk when it comes into the creamery. The first thing you do when you make a cheese is you start culturing that milk right, so we want to acidify it, and the main acidifiers in all of fermentation land are lactobacilli, you know lactic acid bacteria, and we carry over lactobacillus from every single cheese we make, like a solar system and beer or like a like a starter, yeah.

Sam Rheaume: 19:50

So we make yogurt. We take some of the way Yep, as well as some of the milk from every cheese make, and then we're incubating it for several days, making a yogurt, and then we're re inoculating with a lot of these cultures, and these are sort of our wild and environment specific cultures, one that's not only in our landscape but very particularly in our raw milk creamery. So that's part of how we begin to make the cheese, as it cultures and acidifies it Once it hits a very specific point, a very specific pH. That's when we know, okay, it's time to set the curd. So we're pitching in rennet.

Sam Rheaume: 20:37

Now rennet I'm sure you're familiar with, but for those of us who might not be, is a complex of enzymes that are originally derived from the abomasum of the cow, the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf. Right, they are what is helping baby cow digest milk. The commercial, like commodity cheese now uses what's called microbial rennet. So they've actually been able to genetically modify. I believe it's fungi to produce these rennet enzymes and that's the predominant rennet in a lot of commercial cheese. You also see animal rennet, but in a concentrated vial. What we're doing is we actually have what are called VELS, or just these chopped up abomasums which are a byproduct of you can't actually produce them in the US, so we get them from New Zealand. It's a byproduct of the New Zealand beef industry. We're taking these little bits of stomach and we're activating them in a DL-buminized way.

Sam Rheaume: 21:49

Every cheese make you get curds in way we make ricotta out of some of that way. All that fat and protein flow to the top and you get this highly mineral what's called sweet way or kaya. We're infusing that with these actual VELS, the abomasum, to make our own traditional rennet. This is how cheese makers did it ages ago. There are still cheese makers in Europe who do it this way. This is ostensibly the hard way to do it. It's because of variability in milk and therefore the kaya. You get some variability in that rennet. But as soon as we started using this we noted a market difference in that depth of flavor, this lingering umami, with Alcatelman and Whitney in particular. Once we started using it, whitney won Best of Show at the American Cheese Society.

Chef Massey: 22:41

Oh, that's amazing.

Sam Rheaume: 22:42

The putting.

Chef Massey: 22:44

Oh, that's great.

Sam Rheaume: 22:46

But this is all just to illustrate, right, it's like we're not like do it the easy way. People we're like do it because it tastes really delicious. And that's the goal, and so we will go to virtually any length to make the cheese just a little bit tastier.

Chef Massey: 23:04

And that's amazing. What a commitment. When you look at with your cheeses, do you have any like top sellers you recommend for people?

Sam Rheaume: 23:12

Yeah, I mean I would recommend the ones that are probably easiest to acquire and are also like the most Well. First of all, it's my job to say try them all, right.

Chef Massey: 23:25

Yeah, right, right.

Sam Rheaume: 23:28

But the ones that you can find in the wild most consistently are like Harbison, cabot Cloth Mound, probably Big Alias in blue. Harbison is a blue meurine cheese so it has that Brie type rind and it's wrapped in spruce bark and this is like the American original spruce bark wrap cheese. We've seen others like appear but Harbison was there first and there's nothing like a good Harbison. So this one is. If you're a fan of Brie and you like that, like sweet cream, you like the slightly like button mushroomy aroma of a Brie rind, you like sometimes it has a brassica flavor to it, like a cauliflower. Harbison like walks this balance between buttered popcorn and mustardy. When it's really young it can smell like fresh raspberries and as you get close to the bark that surrounds it you get a little bit of that woodsy resiny kind of quality of the spruce.

Sam Rheaume: 24:35

It's this great gradient. It's a great cheese to enjoy Just on its own. Smack it in the middle of a cheese platter. It's pretty, it's round and you get this gradient of flavor. You know that butter in the middle and then, as you get further out, to the rind of all.

Chef Massey: 24:51

Yeah, the magic. It's all magical. That's one of my favorites too, by the way, what's your favorite cheese or cheeses that you have there?

Sam Rheaume: 25:00

I'm an Alpha Tolman super fan, I think, like I obviously love all of the cheeses we produce and I love them all for their own occasion and uses, but Alpha Tolman is the cheese that I will always have on hand. Yeah yeah, I find that it's like shredability quotient oh yeah is great. It like shreds well, it melts beautifully, it has like this depth and complexity of flavor and just because I'm so close to the source, you just get a lot of batch variation. You know, every batch is like a new vintage of wine and we're making a vintage a day, basically, which is amazing.

Sam Rheaume: 25:47

It's great for doing like vertical taste you can really drill down on what the standard flavors and aromas are and then, like right, what other secondary and tertiary flavors and aromas can pop up due to whatever caused the badge to be different that really is amazing.

Chef Massey: 26:06

You know, and I think you know for those people that are listening to you can go on the website and look up.

Sam Rheaume: 26:11

You know the profiles and pairing, which is great for people that are learning yeah, yeah, exactly, and it's our hope to get more sensory evaluation resources out there for the community to use. You know, a big part of what we do is tasting the cheese as it ages, um, so every single batch has like a test wheel that accompanies it throughout its life, and we have a sensory program manager who is going through with both cheese makers and often yours, and they're plugging those wheels, they're tasting their benchmarking like okay, here's what a five month alpha needs to taste like, here's what a six month alpha should taste like. Um, and just evaluating when the cheese is ready to get out there. Because, again, our goal of providing value in order to like build our local economy, our local community and to like sink carbon back into our landscape is all based on like how delicious is that, jesus?

Chef Massey: 27:12

so we need to be tasting it all the time so stay tuned for more sensory which is great. I mean, I don't think people realize that, because you know you look at a brewmaster and wine making you know, everybody as you look at like bourbons and tasting these things and cheeses are the same way, and that skill set in that person tasting it, being able to recognize that they're, they're matched up, you know, is pretty awesome it's about, like, standardizing the palette.

Sam Rheaume: 27:39

You know, it's one thing to make note of an aroma or a flavor, but it's another thing to calibrate a language between multiple people and creating some sort of like standard by which, you know, multiple perceptions can align on a few basic vectors. I guess, right so right, the biggest things that our sensory teams of cheese makers often years, and our program manager are looking at our like, our quantifiable like acidity, like, sweetness, texture, very like tangible things, and we kind of unify our. We've developed our own unit of measure for the final like. But is it good? And it's called the df or the deliciousness factor. So that's our like, overall grading, and it it's the composite of these other aspects of a cheese you know, with cheeses it's like you know with farming there's a season to it.

Chef Massey: 28:40

Cheese rolls that same way you know.

Sam Rheaume: 28:42

In fact we have a cheese that capitalizes on the seasonality of cheese, winamere. So when a mirror is a seasonal raw milk cheese that we make with winter milk. So when cows transition off of pasture and back into like boarded barn, life for the winter diet is shifting, as are there, like color expenditures. You know cows, they're big beasts. It takes a lot of energy to walk out there to the field to graze around. So summer milk tends to be a little leaner, whereas once they transition off of pasture for the season there's a spike of, you know, relatively higher fat. Like in terms of percentages it doesn't look like a lot, but in terms of milk composition, as it pertains to cheese making, it has an impact right, yeah, and I love that cheese too.

Chef Massey: 29:39

By the way, I know you guys deal with your volume and you're really focused on the business side of it. Do you guys offer any sort of like cheese pairing or cheese making classes for the community?

Sam Rheaume: 29:49

yeah, so we do a lot of events out there when, whenever we are able to as a small team, and we do a lot with various restaurants, both regionally and and in further flung parts. Our biggest program that we run up in our neck of the woods is primarily geared towards cheese professionals or food professionals. We call it cheese camp. Oh cool, happens in May. It's geared towards folks who are testing for the CCP certified cheese professional, yeah, and so we bring them up. We have a local lodge, the Highland Lodge, that has cabins, so we go for that camp.

Sam Rheaume: 30:35

We do take breaks and, like sit out by the lake. Right at the center of Greensboro is is Caspian Lake, which is this beautiful glacial like. They'll come up for a three day intensive that includes farm tours, cave tours, as well as hours of lectures that discuss, you know, things like milk composition, talking about what happens to casein, you know, as it's getting snipped apart, what, what? The proteolysis, as you know, the impact of proteolysis as the cheese ages in the vault. We also do sensory evaluation workshops, so it's a little more intensive and geared towards folks within the industry.

Chef Massey: 31:17

Yeah, we're out at public events and as well, doing education and the like and that's amazing too, because I mean there are there have been farms here that are closer to me, or you know, I've gone with some of the kitchen team and we've made cheeses you know, and there's just you know whether you're going out and picking or you're foraging.

Chef Massey: 31:36

When you get the privilege to go into an operation like that, you're like it's very enlightening and there's such a whole nother level of appreciation that's gained yeah, and it's a lot of information to take it in, because science you know, yeah, it's almost alchemy.

Chef Massey: 31:52

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. I know when I was, when we were making cheeses, and you're going through the equations and the amounts and you know you're cutting the curd and you're and the beauty of like you know, taking that cheese and pressing it into its form and you know, not to mention the process of the aging or or rindwashing, continually, and it's just unbelievable.

Sam Rheaume: 32:13

So yeah, it's months of like patient, persistent work, which can feel a little quotidian at times, but when you get to enjoy that cheese, at the end of the day it's, you can tell it's worth it.

Chef Massey: 32:27

Right, exactly.

Sam Rheaume: 32:28

We another just going to give a quick shout out. Another event that we've invested a lot in over the years is the cheese monger invitation. It's a very traditional.

Chef Massey: 32:39

Oh, very cool.

Sam Rheaume: 32:40

You know, with that.

Chef Massey: 32:40

Yeah.

Sam Rheaume: 32:45

It's down in New York, run by a very close friend of you know, andy and Matteo, and so everyone who works here out of Moscow it's.

Sam Rheaume: 32:52

He's done a lot for the culture within the American artisanal cheese movement to edify the cheese monger which you know. They're the last person between you know us and the like happy cheese lover who's buying a wedge of fabric cloth bound for maybe the first time, right. And they're the ones who who are the real storytellers and educators in our industry and they do a lot to like bring you know the general public on board. One you know, one mouth at a time, yeah, so we get the privilege to like go down there during that event and participate with other other producers who are peers, and we have a very sort of familial approach to other makers in this space, in our industry, in this country, yeah, where it's like a rising tide lifts all boats, and so we, we all get in there together and we get a lot of face time with, like the best and brightest of the of the monger. The mongers that are out there. They come from all over to participate in this event and compete to be the cheese monger of the year.

Chef Massey: 34:06

And that's amazing too. You know it's funny at. My next door neighbor is Matt Rubner. Owns Rubner's cheese mongers in Great Barrington. So you know going in there and seeing what Matt does in his team he really celebrates the beauty of cheese from everywhere and it's inspiring.

Sam Rheaume: 34:26

So and the the breadth. And Rubner's is great, by the way. They're. They're good pals and it really does behoove a cheese shop to like engage with the breadth of not just what like we produce or even what's produced within the United States, but, like there's so much tremendous interesting cheese, and to be able to taste it in settings like that where they're getting it with enough shelf life and they know how to care for that cheese and allow it to, sort of, you know, live its fullest life after it leaves the caves. That takes a lot of skill and it takes a lot of passion. So we appreciate everyone in the industry who is, who is who's taking care of the cheese and really like embracing the breadth, and there is a lot of different cheese there.

Chef Massey: 35:20

So it's unbelievable. Yeah, absolutely. You know, Sam, I really do. You know I appreciate your time. I thank you for, you know, jumping in on this episode, Chef Sense, and really sharing what I feel as an example to other cheese makers. It's so inspiring to take what you all are gifted at doing and go. It's my job now to take that baton that you've handed me and make a memory that someone hopefully never forgets on the plate.

Sam Rheaume: 35:51

So Well, I, speaking from my own experience I know the experience of a lot of people who have been here for a long time it makes you feel proud to see something you spent so much time and effort on, Get that extra level of veneration in a restaurant and to find unique angles at like approaching the cheese in a way that we might not be thinking of and, given our context, you know we're in the weeds with very microscopic details. Sometimes you forget to back out and kind of appreciate a gestalt of mixing the cheese with a new flavor or or treating it in a new way. So much much depreciation to all the chefs out there who are, who are using our cheeses, and to you in particular, chef for, for thinking to feature us and having oh absolutely On the air.

Chef Massey: 36:46

Yeah, it's been great. You know, going to your website is the best way to, you know, connect with you guys.

Sam Rheaume: 36:52

Yes, indeed, Jasper Hill Farm dot com. Or you can follow us on Instagram and talk to me personally, probably.

Chef Massey: 37:00

Yeah.

Sam Rheaume: 37:03

We're very customer oriented. You know we do sell a little bit of cheese online, but we are more than happy to field. We get questions all the time via email or over the phone from people who just happened to pick up a harbison at a cheese shop and and they are wondering about what kind of wood is on the outside or why there might be a little bit of blue, green penicillin mold on the on the bark, which is totally normal. It's totally normal, but we are happy to entertain those questions and you can certainly learn a lot more about all of our cheeses. I feel like we only scratch the surface here and yeah, and they updated on what's coming out.

Chef Massey: 37:48

You know, go to the website, learn more. They've got profiles, they've got pairings on there. It's inspiring. Stay connected with these amazing people. You know, and Sam, hopefully maybe we can do another episode with future stuff down the road.

Sam Rheaume: 38:03

Yeah Well, if we do it in person, I will. I'll bring the cheese.

Chef Massey: 38:06

You know what I'll do I'll stop by King Arthur's flower and then drop by. How's that? How's that?

Sam Rheaume: 38:12

I like that there you go. We'll do it from the vaults.

Chef Massey: 38:15

There we go that sounds like that, sounds like a memory maker, so nice oh yeah, yeah, right, right, that's awesome. Well, all right. Well, you all take care, and thanks again.

Sam Rheaume: 38:27

Thank you.

Chef Massey: 38:27

Chef Massey. Yeah, all right, everyone. That is a wrap. You can check us out if you like that. Subscribe Also the Instagram Chef Massey. Let's keep it simple, Chef Masseycom, have a good one. Bye for now.