Small-Batch Cheese, Made the Slow Way

There's a particular smell to a working cheese cave — cool, mineral, faintly sweet — and the moment Daniel Bauer slides open the wooden door of Meadowlark Creamery's aging room, the whole hillside seems to exhale it.

A family practice

Daniel's parents started Meadowlark in 1978 with a single Jersey cow named Beatrice. Today the herd is eighteen strong, and every animal on the farm has a name, a personality, and a place in Daniel's morning routine.

“If you don't know your cows, you don't know your milk. And if you don't know your milk, you have no business making cheese.”

Aged on the hillside

Meadowlark produces a small lineup — a washed-rind tomme, a tangy bloomy round, and a long-aged alpine-style wheel that takes nine months to mature. All of it is sold within a fifty-mile radius. "We could sell it further," Daniel says, "but then it stops being from here. And from here is the whole point."