Cheese Talk: Jason Hinds, Neal’s Yard Dairy

When I started visiting the States in the early Nineties, artisan cheese barely existed – there were very few people making farmhouse or raw milk cheeses, and there was certainly no ‘tradition’ to speak of. It was a new beginning, a blank canvas to paint on. Cheesemakers were able to express themselves, take risks, be brave, find opportunities. They were unencumbered by tradition unlike those in countries with a cheesemaking heritage; they didn’t have a chef with a toque, or a fellow cheesemonger, tapping them on the shoulder and telling them to work in a certain way. Tradition is a great thing but it does halt people who are inspired to create. Had Heston Blumenthal been French or Italian-born he would have been shooed out the door.

America’s best cheesemakers are inspired by what’s come before but are applying their own brave twists because they’re not restricted by geography, politics and so on. They can be as creative as they want to be; they’re very dynamic, and very inspiring.

One of the advantages of creating something new, for which there’s great demand and small supply, is that you can command the right price for it. 20-25 years ago, artisan cheese was absolutely viewed as a novelty but the quality of the cheese has become inordinately better since then.

When we started selling cheese to the US, we were working with specialist shops which had no knowledge of artisan cheese. It’s very hard to champion speciality cheese if you don’t have champions, so over the course of the Nineties we had some involvement in helping to create a generation of them. Once they existed there was a cohort of people to introduce artisan American cheese to the public as it started to come onto the market. I believe part of the reason makers started to produce quality cheese is because they had people to get behind what they were doing and champion it. These people helped create some positive momentum for cheeses which had quite a lot going against them, as they were not from the established cheesemaking nations and were very expensive. You can look to the American Cheese Society to see how fast this sector has grown; its numbers have increased stupendously between the turn of the century and today.

As it stands, 99% of American artisan cheese is sold in the US because a) there’s a market for locally-made produce, and b) it’s more expensive than even imported European cheeses. Its price is even higher in the UK because it is imported in such small quantities that it needs to be flown over, which is costlier than shipping. As a result, at this point the natural home for American artisan cheese is in specialist independent businesses. It’s worth noting that many American cheeses will be twice as expensive as even the otherwise most expensive cheese in the shop; over the course of a year you’re going to have very few return customers for a £100/kg Rogue River Blue, so at Neal’s Yard Dairy we stock it in November and December, when people are shopping for Thanksgiving and Christmas and therefore looking for a treat.