🏭 Cheese dairy

A cheese dairy is a place where milk is turned into cheese: here it is coagulated, the whey is drained off, and the cheese is moulded, pressed and matured. It can be a small farm workshop using its own herd's milk or a plant that collects milk from many farms. Under the Codex Alimentarius standard, cheese is milk protein coagulated by rennet or another coagulant.

The core equipment of a cheese dairy is vats for coagulation, knives for cutting the curd, moulds and presses, brine baths and ripening rooms. Fresh cheeses are ready almost at once, while matured ones ripen for weeks or months at the right temperature and humidity: in one study a semi-hard cheese ripened at 10–16 °C and 75–85% humidity. On the Ukrainian polonyny, the high mountain pastures of the Carpathians, cheesemakers still coagulate sheep's milk in spruce barrels with kliah (lamb or calf rennet) at 32–36 °C.

The first village cheese dairy in the canton of Bern, Switzerland, opened in Kiesen in 1815. In the US, in spring 1851, the farmer Jesse Williams near Rome, New York, founded the first cooperative cheese factory, making cheese from the milk of many neighbouring farms. According to FAOSTAT, the world produced 27.3 million t of cheese in 2023, almost 23 million t of it from whole cow's milk.

Why it matters to you. Cheese quality starts with cold: in the EU, milk is kept at no more than 6 °C before processing. Raw-milk cheese is not banned in the EU — for cheeses ripened for at least 60 days the rules even allow some flexibility. When buying from a farm cheese dairy, ask what milk the cheese is made from and how long it ripened: those two answers say the most about its flavour.