Getting Your Goat

Laura Werlin has crisscrossed the country sampling artisan cheeses and meeting their makers but she says there’s something special about Colorado’s own Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy, which is in the process of making a major expansion without compromising its artisan flavor.

“It’s an unusual model. I don’t know anybody else who’s done what they’ve done,” says Werlin, who featured the farm in her first book, The New American Cheese, and has continued to promote their products in subsequent books and food articles. “I suppose it’s like any company: if you want to grow, you find a way.”

Haystack Mountain is one of only about 200 farmstead cheesemakers nationwide. During the past 14 years, their cheeses have won countless awards from the American Cheese Society and the World Cheese Contest. One of Werlin’s favorites, which she highlights in an article in the current issue of Food and Wine Magazine, is Queso de Mano, which loosely translated means "handmade cheese," and is semi-hard, sweet-tart and made from carefully aged raw milk.

Things have changed dramatically since her first visit to the dairy when she was compiling her inaugural book, published seven years ago, documenting the rise in popularity of small handcrafted cheesemakers. She recently returned to host a signing for her latest book — a how-to called Laura Werlin’s Cheese Essentials — during the dairy’s weekly public visiting hours.

“When I first learned of them I couldn’t get their cheese in California where I lived,” says the San Francisco food writer. “This is a good model for how a small cheesemaker can grow. And it has grown very organically, it seems to me. Maybe this was their plan but I doubt it. Back then you could only get their cheeses in Colorado, now you can get them across the nation. But they haven’t abandoned their values. That is the key and also the challenge for all cheesemakers.”

To read more about cheese whiz Laura Werlin, CLICK HERE.

Haystack Mountain has made a commitment to grow, with plans to move to a new dairy north of Boulder and expand the production of goat cheese logs and multi-flavored cream cheese-like soft spreadables, while continuing with specialty items like their famous Snowdrop and Haystack Peak.

“Our chevre logs are made differently than anyone else’s,” says Tim Overlie, a veteran of natural foods retailing who was named CEO of the operation last year to succeed the original founder, Jim Schott, now 70. “Ours are made drier and denser, while others are real soft and mushy. They typically have about 18 percent of the milk actually getting into the cheese, but ours is more like 12 or 13 percent so it’s a denser more traditional French style of chevre.”

“We just got humane certified,” he adds. “A lot of people, when we were looking to grow and expand the business, said we’d do better without owning the goats. And it’s true. We can buy the milk cheaper. But our story revolves so much around owning goats and taking care of goats and that’s what makes us unique. We aren’t going to give that up. We’re going to have more goats. Our new farm is going to be as ‘green’ as it can be. We think it’s going to be a national model.”