Wisconsin Cheesemaker

All hail the Wisconsin cheesemaker

There's something special about a Wisconsin cheesemaker. Maybe it's the dedication – spending years studying the delicate chemistry of cheese artistry. Perhaps it's the patience it takes – waiting months or years to see your handiwork mature into award-winning cheese. But most likely, the thing that puts the twinkle in your eye if you're a Wisconsin cheesemaker is the knowledge that you are part of a long and honored tradition of making the tastiest, most award-winning, highest-quality cheese on the planet.

Here in Wisconsin, we put our cheesemakers on a bit of a pedestal. Not that you'd know it from talking to them – they're pretty much the humble, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth type. But when you love cheese as much as we do, you gotta give props to the people who work day in and day out to deliver the world's best cheese to your kitchen counter.

So, thank you, Wisconsin cheesemakers – you'll always be heroes to us.

Wisconsin cheesemakers: greatest hits

Wisconsin cheesemakers have spent decades mastering recipes for everything from gouda and muenster cheese to parmesan and provolone, blue cheese and burrata, and hundreds of other traditional cheeses. But even as they produce cheese that rivals the greatest cheeses of Europe and Mexico, Wisconsin cheesemakers have also been busy innovating new cheeses of their own.

Here are a few of our favorites:

• BellaVitano®. This award-winning Wisconsin original has a nutty, fruity flavor and a texture like a young creamy cheddar with the crystalline crunch of a premium farmstead parmesan. It often comes hand-rubbed or soaked in flavors like Black Pepper, Espresso, and Chai.
• Canaria™. This deliciously intense, nutty, and robust olive-oil-cured cheese is made with a blend of sheep, cow and goat milk and is aged for at least two years.
• Chandoka™. This cave-aged, mixed-milk cheddar has a unique flavor profile, with wheels that have an earthy aroma with vegetable undertones and a rich, dense fudgy interior with butter, citrus and grass notes.
• Cupola. This award-winning, semi-hard Wisconsin cheese, with caramel notes and toasted pineapple flavor, gets its name from the small wooden pinnacles that top traditional Wisconsin barns.
• Dunbarton Blue. This potent yet approachable blue has the bite and flavor of a patiently aged cheddar and teases of delicious blue veins. Even the most hardcore blue skeptic will love this earthy, slightly sharp blue cheese.
• EWE CALF to be KIDding. This bright and flavorful cheese is the first triple-milk blue crafted in the U.S.
• GranQueso®. This manchego-inspired beauty is orangey-red on the outside, amber on the inside with wheels that are hand-rubbed in a blend of cinnamon and paprika, and textured in a beautiful basket-weave rind.
• Liederkranz®. An American cousin to German-style limburger, Liederkranz® is a specialty cheese that has a similar texture and aroma but is distinctly robust and buttery.
• Pastorale Blend®. This creamy, earthy and paprika-dusted mixed-milk cheese was inspired by the wide world of Italian farmstead sheep's milk cheeses.
• The Blue Jay. This quintuple cream blue cheese – yes, you read that right – has piney notes derived from juniper berries that are crushed and infused into it.
• Roth Private Reserve. This small-batch alpine-style cheese is a raw-milk treasure, with curds cooked in copper vats and wheels that are cellar-aged and regularly washed, turned and flipped for six months or more.
• Brick. Wisconsin cheesemakers first crafted brick cheese in the late 1800s and named it matter-of-factly after the bricks cheesemakers were using to press the curds. Young brick is deliciously mild with a hint of nuttiness but becomes pungent and even tangy as it ages.
• Colby. This perfect melter was created by Wisconsin cheesemakers in the late 1800s and is considered a milder form of cheddar.

Why are Wisconsin cheesemakers so primo?

When you're a Wisconsin cheesemaker, you are part of a cheesemaking tradition that goes back 175 years, before Wisconsin was even a state. You're also a cheese pioneer and innovator – after all, no place makes more styles, varieties, and flavors of cheese than Wisconsin.

As a Wisconsin cheesemaker, you also have a license – we're the only state in the country that requires it. (We don't believe in letting just any anyone and their uncle Ole make something as precious as cheese.) And you've probably won a bunch of awards – Wisconsin cheesemakers have won 5,552 cheese awards altogether, more than any other state or country on earth.

But mostly, when you're a Wisconsin cheesemaker, you have the knowledge that you're making some of the best cheese in the universe. And who wouldn't want to be part of that club?