(cheerful music) - Winter Hill Farm is a small, diversified dairy farm, primarily a dairy farm, but we also raise pigs and chickens.

And I do vegetables and flowers in the summer.

My main position here is cheesemaker, Head Cheesemaker.

We make nine different types of cheese.

We milk year-round.

We make cheese year-round.

We sell to a lot of local restaurants and stores, and we do a farmer's market every Saturday of the year.

- Yeah, so these cows were all milked this morning, at 5:30 in the morning, and then they get milked again at about 4:30 in the afternoon.

We have a real focus on high-quality milk, the somatic cell count, but then also the fat and protein content is super important to us.

We breed with all of those things in mind to try to build a herd that makes the best-quality milk for what we do with it, which is making cheese.

We're not making a huge batch today, but we're making a raw milk cheese, our Everett's Tome.

So this is basically just the milk that's been transferred and now it's heating.

And it is a raw milk cheese, so we just heat it to 88 degrees.

And then at that point, we'll add the cultures that we want, the bacteria.

When we think about probiotics, this is basically a probiotic culture and they like this warm milk.

And so, they'll change the lactose into lactic acid.

And what you'll see is the pH will start to drop.

And once the pH starts to drop in the milk, we know that bacteria is doing what they need to do and we can add the rennet.

And at that point, the rennet will basically separate the curd from the whey.

After a certain amount of mixing, we will end up scooping all the curd out into molds, something like this.

This is blue.

Essentially, it's the same sort of idea where we'll pull all the curd out and put 'em into molds like this, where they drain for a few days.

We salt them and then we turn them out to let them dry.

And then they end up going downstairs into the cheese cave.

Actually, before it goes into the cave, we have to like physically pierce it.

We open up the rind a little bit to let that mold get some oxygen.

And then, yeah, we put it downstairs, and it stays down in the cave at 50 degrees.

And about 90% relative humidity for at least 60 days.

(relaxing music) This is our raw milk aging cave.

Ideally, we really need to keep the humidity fairly high in here.

And you'll notice we don't have condensation anywhere.

Thanks to these controls up here, which help us regulate the dewpoint.

So all the cheeses in here are raw milk cheeses, kind of like the one that we're making upstairs today.

So that's our Everett's Tome.

And then we have a lot of blue cheese in here.

So pretty much like all of this and all of this is all blue.

They have to age for at least 60 days, but they can age for a number of months.

And some of them, we want to age for a number of months, like the Collins Brook.

We try to age them for at least six months.

So we have Collins Brook down here, which is like an Italian-style grating cheese.

And then we have our blue cheese, and you can actually see a lot of the blue mold growing on the outside.

We want it on the inside, which is why we pierce it.

But it does like to grow on the outside.

I mean, we kinda joke about how blue mold will grow anywhere you don't want it to grow, but to get it to grow where you want it to grow is very difficult.

Took me a couple of years to really develop a recipe where I was getting enough airspace in the cheese, and able to get the blue cheese, the blue mold, inside the cheese.

So, that was a pretty frustrating one.

Our pigs were pretty happy for a few years there while I was developing that recipe.

- Pigs are sort of a perfect compliment to what we do with the dairy, because our primary by-product from cheesemaking is whey.

Whey is rich in protein.

And it's something the pigs love.

And every morning we actually fill one of these troughs up, and the pigs just converge on it and just slurp it down.

They absolutely love it.

They get all the whey, anytime we have any cheese scraps.

The pigs are always really happy when we're trying to develop a new cheese.

'Cause we have to do batch after batch of experimentation.

And so, they benefit from our experiments and mistakes.

- We consistently make eight different types of cheeses.

And then, every once in a while, we'll just experiment with cheeses, or we'll do like a one-off batch.

Or other things that we enjoy to do is working with like breweries.

This is our Terzetto, which is made using Allagash Tripel.

After it's made, it gets washed three times.

And so, it gets washed in beer.

There's no beer actually in the cheese, but the outside gets washed and brushed with the beer.

Why we do that is we want to get that sort of bacterial colony that creates a little bit of that orange color, pungency.

The wash rind cheeses tend to be this, what we call the stinky cheeses.

This was a cheese that was contracted by Allagash Brewing Company to have in their tasting room, which is pretty cool.

I'm pretty excited to have that connection with them.

This is a smallish batch of feta that we made.

We make them in these big square molds, and then they drain for a few days, they're salted and then they get put into a brine.

And this is one of our award-winning cheeses, actually.

We're pretty proud of this one.

- Sarah and I both have a passion for great food, for sustainable agriculture, for helping to contribute to the community aspect, a local community economy.

And that's what I love about operating a small farm.

I mean, we're essentially growing food for our friends and for our neighbors, and they're supporting us so that we can do what we love to do.

- [Sarah] Yeah, overall, it's just, I wouldn't wanna be anywhere else.

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