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Ashe County Cheese: The Taste of Tradition
Travel back in time to dairy country in the early 1900’s.
Gone are four-lane thoroughfares. Black and white heifers graze along fence-lined country roads leading to the general store, a store that sells the freshest dairy products from neighborhood farms. Cheese is sliced from a round “wheel” covered in red wax, weighed and wrapped for each customer.
Ashe County Cheese in West Jefferson is a taste of that forgotten time. The factory began in 1930 as the Kraft Phoenix Creamery. As sprawling companies emerged, one by one community factories disappeared from the landscape and with them, the old ways of producing cheese.
In Wisconsin, Mike Everhart grew up in an apartment above a cheese factory. As a boy he spent time each afternoon preparing boxes and wrapping cheese. As Mike grew to manhood he decided to do what he knew best – make cheese. With co-owner, Tom Torkelson, himself the son of a dairy farmer, Mike ran a Wisconsin-based cheese company, Newburg Corners Cheese, Inc.
The duo learned of a struggling cheese factory in West Jefferson, originally owned by Kraft Phoenix Creamery. While visiting West Jefferson, Mike fell in love with the mountain vistas and friendly people. He hoped to preserve the site’s traditional cheese-making process. In 1994, the pair purchased the factory, naming it the Ashe County Cheese Company.
Today it is the only surviving cheese factory from the 1900’s in North Carolina. The cheese is still made from farm-fresh milk and pressed by hand into forms for the traditional cheese wheel.
Some 1950’s equipment was introduced into the factory to reduce the most labor-intensive parts of the process. Otherwise the cheese is made in much the same way as it was fashioned almost a century ago, giving Ashe County Cheese its signature flavor.
Milk arrives to the factory from neighboring dairies, is pasteurized and flowed into 2,000 gallon vats. Through the observation window, you can watch as milk is transformed into a Jello-like consistency, cut, heated, stirred, drained, salted, and packed into molds to be pressed and dried.
Once the cheese wheel leaves your sight, it is dipped in wax, first in clear and then in red. Cheese is made most weeks on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday, but the schedule varies so call ahead to see if cheese will be made on the day you want to visit.
Across the street in the Ashe County Cheese store, you can purchase cheese and fresh butter in addition to other souvenirs. The store is open from 8:30 a.m.to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday.
Tour groups should call ahead during leaf-season, Mike advises.
The store’s most-sought-after specialty is fresh cheese curds, marble-sized pieces of unpressed cheese that have a moist, springy texture and a distinctive cheese flavor. Other favorites are classics like Monterey Jack, Colby, Colby Jack and Lightening Jack (Pepper Jack).
G.C. Green, 76, of West Jefferson remembers walking his children to the cheese factory in the early 1960’s. A worker would scoop out the tasty morsels in small bags that the children would eat on the way home.
Today, tour buses of seniors, tourists and school children from across N.C. and around the corner visit the factory to taste the fresh cheese, including on occasion G.C.’s grandchildren.
“What we have done is continue the tradition since the 1930’s and it really hasn’t changed much,” said Mike.
For more information call Ashe County Cheese Store at (336) 246-2501 or visit their website at www.ashecountycheese.com.
by Virginia Walker
