Close Connections
Rogue River Creamery and Rogue Ales are two entirely separate Oregon businesses, connected only by a name and a dedication to excellent food and drink. The brewing company is over 20 years old, one of the oldest in the modern craft tradition, but the creamery dates back to the 1930s, opened and operated by the well-known Vella family of cheese makers. In the 1950s, the creamery became one of the first in the west to make a cave-aged blue cheese in the Roquefort style.
David Gremmels, with two decades in marketing behind him, and his partner, Cary Bryant, bought the creamery in 2002. By the next year, Gremmels had moved into the top ranks of cheese makers. Rogue River Blue is a new take on blue cheese, wrapped in grape leaves macerated in brandy. It won Best Cheese in America at the 2009 American Cheese Society, the latest of many prizes.
But, given the kinship of names, a Rogue-Rogue alliance was a natural, and Rogue Chocolate Stout Cheddar was born. The curds are bathed in the brewery’s stout (which also contains real bittersweet chocolate and oats) and chocolate syrup, giving the finished cheese a variegated appearance and buttery, cocoa and coffee flavors.
On the other side of the country, Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont has brought cheese and beer together even more intimately.
The farm serves as the aging facility for Cabot’s cloth-bound cheddar, and other Vermont creameries send their cheeses to be finished in the extensive cellars. The constant temperature and humidity, perfect for ripening cheese, inspired a beer-cheese collaboration.
Shaun Hill, a relative of the eponymous Jasper Hill and an aspiring brewer at the time, recalls drinking a beer on his porch with cheese maker Mateo Kehler. “We shared the notion: what if we made a beer that was saturated with the same microorganisms native to the cellar that houses the ripening cheeses? A spontaneous, open fermentation, and then wash the cheese with the beer?”
Hill brewed a mid-range red ale, low in bitterness, and left the beer to cool and sit open in the cellars for a couple of days. The spontaneously-fermented lambic-like beer was used on a rind-washed cheese called Winnimere, which was then wrapped in a strip of spruce bark from the farm. In years that followed, Hill experimented with adding various strains of Brettanomyces or Lactobacillus.
Hill has spent the past two years brewing at Nørrebro Bryghus in Copenhagen, during which time Kehler tested beer washes from Russian River, Goose Island and Brooklyn breweries. Now, Hill is back in Vermont, about to open his own venture, Hill Farmstead Brewery. In December, he announced “Just this week, I am brewing the next batch of beer that will be used to wash this season’s Winnimere.”
The explosion in American artisan cheese production and public support is newer than the revolution in craft beer, but both are young. Still, if beer lovers can boast that American innovators have given the beer-loving public a greater range of choice than is available in any of the great European brewing nations, the same may soon be true of our cheese. For the same reasons—a diversity of immigrant traditions, and a willingness to borrow from and break with those same traditions—the counter at your local cheese store may also give you the most diverse choices available to cheese lovers anywhere.
