It’s getting real!

 

We have windows and doors in!
We have windows and doors in!

Lots of bits and pieces have been happening recently.  Building work has slowed down a bit since the heady days when the walls went up.  The thing holding us up is that the concrete laid as foundations for our floor has cracks and although it’s quite likely that these are just cracks caused by the concrete drying, we need to be sure they aren’t a sign of something more serious like subsidence.  So we wait for someone with structural engineering knowledge to assess them and sign them off.

Once that is done we can put in the framework for the first floor and with that in place, we can start to put in the panelling that forms the interior walls.  In other words, we’ll have rooms.

Meanwhile I have been working on paperwork still – the end is in sight finally.  Actually, I hope it is, every time I say that to myself, I remember some other record sheet or schedule that I’ll need and it goes on the job list.  We’ve ordered and paid for our industrial dishwasher, the final payment on the equipment from Avedemil has been made and 4 pallets including vat, racks, wash tubs, multimoulds and stainless steel tables should soon be on their way to us.  The pipework to divert our milk out of the main milkline before it can be cooled or can get into the bulk tank is on order and we’re pushing for it to be in by 11th August.

Why 11th August did you ask?  Well because officially I have a date to move south.  7th August.  And come what may, I will be on the payroll as of the 11th as with Rose on holiday in Greece, I’ll be managing the build and using our warm milk, I’ll be making trial cheeses in the kitchen of my house and then maturing them in a wine fridge.  It will be good to get my hands on some curds again – just have to remember to order a few key bits of gear: starters, a tub to make cheese in, an electric blanket and indeed the wine fridge.

The trial cheesemaking came about on a visit from Jason Hinds, David Lockwood and Bronwen Percival from Neal’s Yard Dairy.  They came for an informal morning chat to look at progress, talk about the quality of cheese they are looking for and its implications for milk quality, sales and advice on our financials.  All three of them felt that as soon as the milk was in place, making some kitchen trials would be well worth the exercise in understanding where the milk quality is at this year (it’s bound to be rather different to February when we last did any testing and again to last summer when I was making trial cheeses at SAF) as well as hopefully having something to taste and start to comment on. We’re going to go down to London for a big cheese tasting with Bronwen at the end of August which will be a useful calibration exercise.  In theory I know what their cheeses are like but it’s a few years now since I’ve been tasting them regularly and I’ll need a refresher to check out our washed rind competition.  For Rose, seeing how Bronwen tastes, assesses flavour and quality and understanding what she is looking for will be invaluable.  It’s her job to look after sales when we’re up and running so a bit of calibration with one of our customers (we hope) can only be a good thing.

So it’s a mixed bag as I’m sure will be familiar to anyone who’s been involved in building work: some progress, some delays and on not too many occasions the odd step backwards.  Overall though we’re getting there and with a confirmed date in the diary for me to start work, it’s getting real.

Walls and Windows

Well, it’s not so long since I was getting excited about concrete being down on the floor and drainage channels being dug.  However today, I have received most exciting photos.  The outside walls are nearly up.  Most of the cladding is up and you can really get a sense of what the building itself will look like finally.  It’s looking pretty good, I must say.

Meanwhile, I am still working on HACCP and Quality Systems paperwork.  It’s a long haul and will be the subject of another post in due course.  Just need to get the stuff finished first!

Nettlebed Creamery as seen from the Western corner.
Nettlebed Creamery as seen from the Western corner.

 

The 2 Cheesemaking Rooms (1 for St Bartholomew and 1 for the blue cheese).
The 2 Cheesemaking Rooms (1 for St Bartholomew and 1 for the blue cheese).

 

Nettlebed Creamery, first floor. This is where our offices and staffroom will go.
Nettlebed Creamery, first floor. This is where our offices and staffroom will go.

 

Nettlebed Creamery, the Western side. Look. Doors.
Nettlebed Creamery, the Western side. Look. Doors.

New things are a-happening!

So it has been over a month since I last wrote but buildings are being built, logos are being designed, websites created and as you know from my visit to Avedemil, equipment is being bought.

So, as we left it, we had steels and the best part of a roof.  After that, the builders had to dig drainage channels which meant that progress wasn’t hugely visible but was made.  Finally however we have concrete on the floors and bits of walls up  – brick at the bottom and wooden frames which are going to support traditional dark wood cladding.

The floor is down. Concrete baby.
The floor is down. Concrete baby.

 

The view that I will be gazing on from my make room as I make St Bartholomew
The view that I will be gazing on from my make room as I make St Bartholomew

 

As you know I already blogged about visiting Avedemil which was an experience for definite but in a good way. While we wait for our equipment to be delivered, we have also been putting our bursary money to good use by commissioning a website.  It’s just a holding page at the moment but with Harry Darby (NYD’s design guru) on our side, we’re hoping for some great things in the future.  So far we’ve just decided on our house fonts and incorporated them into the holding site and business cards.  Photos are to follow!

In the meantime, I’ve been doing a lot of HACCP.  Which, if you’ve done it before, will explain why it’s been a bit quiet on the blog.  My head hurts.

Avedemil

Anyone who has hired Ivan Larcher as a consultant will at some time or other, buy equipment from Avedemil.  It’s a mystical destination in the Poitou Charentes region of France that is regarded as a cheese Aladdin’s Cave.

Avedemil Warehouse
Avedemil Warehouse

Of course, when it came to buying our equipment too, we planned it into the budget to buy from Avedemil as well.  It needed a leap of faith but it was a leap worth taking

Their website is very basic and actually about 2 days before I left, just as I was trying to work out their address, it went offline.  I know from previous experience at Neal’s Yard that when it comes to communications, in France the phone is still king.  Email is used but particularly in retail or in agricultural sections of business, nothing replaces just talking to someone.  This is actually a pretty healthy way of going about things.  I am increasingly aware that as stiff-assed Brits, we rely too much on firing off an email, status update or tweet about something, because it’s easier than having to engage with someone in real time.  Talking is still the best way to get a repsonse, sale or communicate information.

However if it’s talking in a language you last studied over 20 years ago when you were at school, then thank God for the full arsenal of communication technology.  Emailing and running a sections of text through Google Translate before you insert them into the text of your email, allowed me to first contact Mr Yannick Le Blanc of Avedemil and to his credit, although not always all that speedily, he replied to the extent that before even visiting I had been able to buy a vat and send him a list of other things I was looking for.  For the latter, I found going through Coquard‘s online catalogue and making a list of technical equipment-based french vocabulary was also pretty damn useful.  The trusty Collins French English Dictionary that saw me through A levels would have sadly let me down there, I fear.

So with little idea of where I was going, recommendations from everyone I knew but only a belief that surely they would have the things we needed, I committed Nettlebed Creamery’s money to buying me a flight, hotel rooms, car hire and set off, fervently hoping I wouldn’t find out later I could have ordered it all cheaper in the UK.  On that point, I was at least relatively sure as long as they had the things we needed that they’d have them at a better price.  I’d been trawling around looking for vats before we arranged the trip and for the sort of thing I wanted, I only found two options: 1,000 litre cheese vat on the goat nutrition website which is too big for what we want and cost a hefty £25,000 or buy something new from Jongia which would also be into the tens of thousands.  Avedemil’s website had a blue cheese, tilting vat and on enquiring about the price we heard the very welcome news that they wanted 3,500 Euros + VAT.  That price difference alone justified my trip.

Having now been there in person, I can report back that yes, you just have to make the leap of faith and go there.  I flew out of Stansted into Poitiers which is a charmingly tiny airport.  We then drove an hour south in more or less a perfect straight line to Chaunay about a quarter of an hour out of Ruffec the town in which Avedemil is based.  The following morning at 10.30am we met Mr Le Blanc and having already heard something about us from Ivan who unfortunately couldn’t join us as a listeria emergency called him away to another client, he began to formulate the list of equipment that we needed.

Chaunay and its only hotel, bar and restaurant
Chaunay and its only hotel, bar and restaurant

Mr Le Blanc has been doing this job for a long time and he knows a lot about what you need for each type of cheese.  With a basic working knowledge of Taleggio and taking into account that we didn’t want to use square moulds because it would make the cheese look very like St James, he set about showing us the various combinations of bits of kit we might need: plateaux (draining trays), block moulds, racks, a clever pallet truck thingy to move the racks about so they don’t have to be on wheeled bases and then roll all over the floor you’ve specially had laid to slope for ease of drainage.  We looked at the vat, discussed the neccessity of a raised platform to stand on because of my lack of height.  We looked at soaking tubs that will fit our racks for ease of washing and the wheeled bases they can go on.  And so much more.  It was like going round a supermarket sweep.  Whereas in the UK we’d have had to get inventive or make do with things that didn’t quite fit what we needed them to do, here was a warehouse filled to the roof, in the style of the hangar at the end of Indiana Jones where they put the Ark of the Covenant, with things that just worked.

Racks and chariots
Racks and chariots

 

We spent a couple of hours there, made up a list which would form the basis for a quote he’d send us later and left.  Job done nicely.  The quote came in a few days later when I’d returned to the UK.  14,000 Euros for the lot.  I am still unsure about the block moulds.  I want to use individual ones and cloth lined at that.  I am also not sure that the ones he showed me would allow the cheeses to drain adequately as they didn’t seem to me to have quite enough holes and we may need to get a bit Heath Robinson where that’s concerned.

The only point, however is, you need to do your homework.  I had my list of technical vocab and I brought with me a pretty fluent French speaker in the form of my Dad for when my own stores of French ran out.  I think my old teachers would be relatively pleased with what I did manage to remember and I could just about have managed on my own but Mr Le Blanc and the rest of his staff don’t speak any English so be warned.

A visit to Nettlebed

Yesterday, on a gloriously sunny day, my parents and I went to visit Nettlebed.  They were curious about where I was going to be living, having never seen it.  I needed to look around the house I’ll probably be living in with a view to things like furniture and curtains.  I also, of course, wanted to have a look at the building site.

Frankly, yesterday, the place could not have looked prettier and we had a productive time measuring windows in the house etc.  Then, we moved on to look at the site.

Progress has been made, my friends.  Progress has been made.

Drainage channels have been dug (that’s why there are piles of earth everywhere at floor level in the photo).  Timbers to provide a framework for wall cladding are up.  The brickwork of the walls at the bottom will be being done next week according to the two charmingly polite lads on the site.

In about a week’s time it’s going to look properly like a building which is very exciting indeed.

Bits of walls. Piles of rubble. All good progress.
Bits of walls. Piles of rubble. All good progress.

 

And the house?  Very nice indeed.  I’m already making plans for the garden which, I think, is a good sign.

IMG_1236 (2)

Link

Technical Cheese Geekery – Can’t wait!!

 

Prototype St Bartholomew curd
Prototype St Bartholomew curd

 

 

Technical Cheese Geekery – Can’t wait!!

Two years ago the Specialist Cheesemakers Association and Neal’s Yard Dairy held a conference aimed at furthering the links between artisan cheesemakers and the scientific community.

Despite a generously discounted ticket offered by Bronwen Percival, I was too broke to afford to go.  At the time, I wasn’t making cheese either so instead of experiencing it in the flesh, I pored over the video files that they uploaded later to listen to presentations, particularly by Marie-Christine Montel on microflora in raw milk.

The dates for this year’s conference have actually been in my diary since last September but there was still a present worry that with all the money we’re spending on building a dairy, going to the conference would stretch the cashflow too far and I’d have to miss it yet again.  This year, as we’re hopefully starting to make cheese in July, all the topics which prioritise milk production for raw milk cheese, are even more relevant.  Without expecting to get anywhere but thinking we may as well have a go, we applied for a bursary and got one!  With the condition that we buy one ticket, we can get another ticket paid by the bursary.

Really looking forward to it.  It’s going to be GREAT.

Dougal Campbell Bursary

Image

Last week, the Soil Association announced three winners of its Dougal Campbell Cheese Bursary.  We applied, for Nettlebed Creamery, in early February and to be honest didn’t really expect to get anywhere.  But we did.  In fact we are one of the winners!

Dougal Campbell was a very influential figure in the Specialist Cheese industry who I’m afraid I never met.  I do know people who speak feelingly of how inspirational and generous he was with his knowledge and time.  If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have either Lincolnshire Poacher or Hafod on our cheeseboards to name but two.

I do remember his cheese though.  In the mid 90s when I was fresh out of university and learning the ropes at this quirky shop in Covent Garden called Neal’s Yard Dairy, we received a delivery of some of the last Tyn Grug cheeses he had made before he died.  Possibly because it coincided with me learning to set up a display and learning to sell and taste out cheese to customers, I can still l distinctly remember the big, heavy natural-rinded wheels that could be built into a pleasingly eye-catching tower.  I remember the cheese’s golden colour and a fruity flavour that flirted with wildness.  I also remember the sadness at his death  that was felt at Neal’s Yard amongst the more experienced mongers behind the counter who had met him and knew the cheese and its maker considerably better than I did.  It feels very apt to have the influence of this cheesemaker again as I’m embarking on another new learning curve.

In order to apply for the bursary, we had give details of how our farm is managed along organic guidelines and our intentions for the cheese.  I found it pretty interesting, not least learning about what Phil the farm manager does.  With a bit of luck you will too.

Nettlebed Creamery is a new business and we are in the process of building a dairy with the aim of making a washed rind cheese and a blue cheese using the organic milk produced on the Nettlebed Estate at Merrimoles Farm.

Merrimoles Farm has been in the Fleming family since 1901. The farm is a mixture of arable, sheep and dairy. The Dairy has been sited at Bix since 1969; it became organic in 2004.

There are over 130 cattle in the dairy herd. They are cross-bred Holstein Fresians with Swedish Reds and Montbelliards.

Some specific farming practices with a view to sustainability

The herd are fed using as much home grown feed as possible including in addition to grazing: clover silage, whole crop barley, grain and beans (approx. 15% is purchased – parlour cake).  The growth of pasture and feeds are managed using a rotation including clover crops to fix nitrogen and provide fodder.  

The cross breeding of the dairy cows (Holstein-Friesian, Swedish Red & Montbeliards) has been undertaken to maintain hybrid vigour and provide long lasting, healthy, fertile animals.

The farm is in the Organic Entry Level Scheme (OELS) and has established grass margins, maintains hedgerows and trees and has areas of low input grassland to maintain and increase biodiversity.  They alternate grazing with sheep where possible to limit the effect  of internal parasites, reduce the need to worm and therefore avoid wormer resistance worms.  They use 500t of Green Waste Compost annually to maintain soil reserves and avoid using finite mined fertilisers. In addition they have invested in energy saving  electric motors and a heat recovery unit at the dairy (milking) to reduce our energy use.

The Creamery, we are building, is designed taking energy efficiency into account.  We will be using water from our neighbour’s woodchip boiler for all our hot water and for our heating as well. We have plans to use solar panels from the roof of the barn next door (our landlord is finalising these plans currently). After our first year of cheese making we will be creating a wetland system to take all the grey water, sewage and the whey from the facility: a system of swales and ditches to filter the waste into clean water. We then intend to plant fruit trees and willows, rushes and wild orchids to assist with the water filtration and at the same time encourage biodiversity.

The cheeses we intend to make will be made using raw milk and using traditional, liquid yoghurt starter cultures.  Eventually we intend to culture our own starters and ripening agents solely from the raw milk produced by the estate and vegetable matter grown on the estate (a valuable potential source of lactic acid bacteria), eliminating the need for bought in cultures.

The cheeses will be entirely made by hand which suits the production of soft and blue cheeses best.  We will use open vats and the cheese will be made without the use of mechanical stirrers as our soft and blue cheeses require a more gentle handling.  A comprehensive set of maturing rooms has been designed to then ensure the cheeses are kept at the appropriate humidity and temperature at all stages of their ripening.

By building a dairy we intend to provide the farm with a future for its Dairy herd which is no longer subject to the fluctuating prices of the milk market.  The need for an alternative customer to the current purchaser on the farm was highlighted at a point when the milk price and amount of organic premium was cut without very much warning. 

Our dairy will negotiate a fair milk price for the farm that allows them to be profitable and importantly that is guaranteed.  In return for milk being produced to specific standards regarding bacterial levels and fat and protein content our milk price can be increased.  In addition to cheese, we have plans to investigate the possibilty of using more of the farm’s milk to produce a range of yoghurts and frozen yoghurt.  This in turn will allow the farm to maintain and improve on its current sustainable practices and will mean it does not have to dramatically increase herd size in order to turnover more money.  

Re-reading this, although these are the aims we’ve talked about since the beginning it does make me feel a little nervous as our aim of fair milk price and providing a sustainable future for the herd will only work if the cheese is as good as I can make it and therefore we sell plenty of it.

No pressure!!

Paris is always a Good Idea

Paris from my taxi ride after the Salon de Fromage
Paris from my taxi ride after the Salon de Fromage

As Audrey Hepburn apparently said, ‘Paris is always a good idea’.  Even better if it happens to be hosting an agricultural show which according to Patricia Michelson of La Fromagerie and various other cheesemakers, is a must see.

With hopes of learning more about farming and cheesemaking equipment, Rose and I booked the Eurostar and set off.  It took a relatively short metro ride to get to Paris Expo and we were able to buy our entry tickets to the Salon d’Agriculture pretty easily.  We acquired lunch and looked at some cows, picking up leaflets on Montbeliards as we went and perused the map trying to find the Salon de Fromage.

Apparently it’s all been a bit easier to find and get into in other years but this year it took full on detective work to find the cheese bit of the show.  This is partly because it’s for professionals only and perhaps the guards last year just got fed up of turning away members of the public but all the same it was due to a good degree of exploration of the site and some fine ad lib blagging on Rose’s part and translation on my part that we got in.

We had business cards for Rose’s old business and luckily because we’d planned on talking about it on the train we had a plan showing the design of our dairy.  We first profered the business cards.  No good.  We called people we knew who were in there.  They weren’t answering their phones.  Rose got out the plans of the dairy and began talking the security guard through the process in franglais.  At this juncture, he realised we were

a) obstinate

b) legitimate

c) possibly slightly deranged

and sent us chasing after a nice lady in a green jacket who officially lead us past the security and to the desk in the hall where you presented your business cards and were allowed to register as a visitor.  Not entirely sure why it had been so cloak and dagger to get to that point but never mind, we were in.

Inside, we wandered around lots of stands of cheese in its many and varied forms.  We stopped by An Bord Bia’s stand and looked at their cheeses, unfortunately just missing a chance to say hi to the Furnos from Cashel Blue.  We found Guffanti’s stand and tried their Taleggio and different types of Gorgonzola.  They were really good.  We, of course, said hello at the Neal’s Yard Dairy stand and in the course of conversation that networker par exellence that is Jason HInds managed to direct us to a good paper supplier and to a nice cheese affineur called Mark who loved the idea of people going into making cheese and has offered to take us to visit some Reblochon producers in May or June.  We also ran into Jonny Crickmore who had come over on a very early train with Julie Cheney and who were both just leaving but we just had time to chat and compare notes on milk testing and things to look at in the cheese show.

After that as we partook of a nice glass of wine (well when in Paris…) at the show’s wine bar / restaurant we took stock, talked about website, packaging, labelling and other things that had absolutely nothing to do with vats and stainless steel but were very productive nonetheless.  And as we rounded the corner on a final tour of the show we managed to finally track down my sister and the inimitable Jon Thrupp who were chatting away to their Beaufort affineur.  They were mid meeting so there was only really a chance to say a quick hello but it’s always nice to run into friends and family even if it is only brief.

Having successfully found paper, Reblochon hosts and had a chance to chat cheese with Julie and Jonny, we set off for the Gare du Nord so Rose could catch a train home.  I stayed on in Paris for a very quiet night in (it had been a very early start) hence the photo of the Moulin Rouge from my taxi and returned to Blighty the following morning slightly regretting not having more time to do a good visit to the recommended Fromageries and buy up all the washed rind cheese I could.

Paris is great. I could have stayed all week!

Meanwhile at Nettlebed the steel is being repaired (you'll notice it's not the same colour as it was) and we're getting closer to putting up the walls and roof.
Meanwhile at Nettlebed the steel is being repaired (you’ll notice it’s not the same colour as it was) and we’re getting closer to putting up the walls and roof.

Stripping the Barn

Image
Facing South from the Skeleton of our Barn

‘There seems to be rather less of it than there was before,’ my mum said as I proudly showed her the photos that proved work was continuing on our building site, ‘Is that right?’

It is right although it’s understandable that it doesn’t immediately seem like a step forward.  Before the new roof goes on and the external wood cladding, they have to remove the old roof that needs to be replaced and check the metal structure for repairs.  Next step will be repairs to the frame and to the concrete foundations that each steel stanchion sits in.  After that, comes the excitement of new roof and the walls going up.

Until then, in this instance, less is actually more.

Image
Our building site!