Cheese

Did you know that Vermont is home to the "World's Best Cheddar"? While Cabot cheese is one of Vermont's best known cheeses, there are a host of Vermont cheesemakers that also make a wonderful assortment of Vermont cheeses.

Types of Vermont Cheese

From cheddar to Gouda, blue cheese to mozzarella, you can find just about any style of cheese in Vermont.

Our cheese producers boast many different specialty cheeses made from milk produced by either the cow, goat – even sheep! Each of these milks results in a different style of cheese. And because Vermont has different cows – Holsteins, Brown Swiss, or Jerseys, for example – as well as goats and sheep, the varieties result in many different unique flavors of cheese.

Great cheese begins with great milk. When you taste a wonderful Vermont cheese, it reflects good feed, quality milk, and excellent production standards.

Cheese made from Cow's Milk

Cow's milk cheeses include cheddar, Colby, cottage, Gouda as well as blue cheese, mascarpone, mozzarella, Brie and more. Because cow's milk ranges in color from ivory to pale yellow to light golden, so do the cheeses. These naturally occurring variations come from Vitamin A, or beta-carotene. These colors then darken with age.

Cheese from Sheep's Milk

In mid-19th century Vermont, sheep outnumbered people by 10 to 1! Those sheep help produce merino wool and disappeared after the market for wool collapsed.

Today, enterprising Vermont cheesemakers are now producing sheep's milk cheese. Although sheep produce less milk than cows, ewe's milk is pure white and more concentrated.

Some kinds of sheep's milk cheese include: feta, various soft-ripened and aged European-style cheeses, and a few blended cow and sheep's milk cheeses.

Ever tried Goat Cheese?

Most of us have enjoyed goat cheese in a salad without ever knowing we were eating it. Feta is a goat cheese and is a popular accompiniment to salads.

Goats produce a relatively large amount of low- to medium-fat pure white milk that is made into a broad array of award-winning cheeses.

Feta, chevre, Brie and other soft-ripened and aged goat cheeses are some examples of goat cheese.

Making cheese is hard work!

Vermont's leading cheesemakers are artisan producers and their products are only available seasonally or in limited quantities because they are so labor intensive to produce. Because milk characteristics vary with the season, each cheese is unique with distinctive characteristics.

Just as it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, it takes much more milk to make a pound of cheese. On average, it takes about 10 pounds of cow or goat's milk or six pounds of sheep's milk to produce one single pound of cheese.