- In the tiny town of Cabot, Vermont,
this creamery has been churning out
dairy products for a hundred years.
Their claim to fame: the Vermont cheddar.
Cabot Creamery makes about 130 million pounds
of the stuff each year,
and it ends up on shelves across the US.
Their extra sharp cheddar nabbed first place
in the 2019 US Championship Cheese Contest
while their mild and medium cheddars got first
in the 2018 World Championship for Cheese.
Yup, such a competition exists, and I want to be a judge.
So how does Cabot Creamery make
the world's tastiest cheddar cheese?
Well, it all started here in Vermont
on a family farm.
In 1919, 94 farmers in Cabot hoping to better market
their dairy products formed a cooperative.
This co-op meant the farmers not only owned the Cabot brand
but saw 100% of the profits.
Fast-forward a century, and the creamery
still runs on this model.
But today, more than 800 family farms
across New England own Cabot.
Farms just like this one.
This is Fairmont in East Montpelier, Vermont.
- My name's Clara, and I'm a third-generation
dairy farmer here at Fairmont.
My husband tells me that he's eaten more cheese
since he's met me than he ever did in his life before.
- As part of the Cabot Cooperative,
Clara's family knows exactly where their milk is going
and even what products it will become.
- Our milk mostly becomes hard cheeses and butter.
- Cabot deals with making,
marketing, and selling the cheese
so the farmers can focus on what they do best: milking cows.
Clara's family has almost 15,000 Holstein cows
at their two farms, one in East Montpelier
and one in Craftsbury, Vermont.
- We ship about 5 million gallons of milk a year.
- Fairmont milks their cows
using a milking machine attached
to the udders by a farmhand.
- The cows are being really well cared for
and loved by family farmers, and that's really special.
- But some of Cabot's newest
farm facilities are using robotic milkers
to speed up the process.
Once the milk is collected, it's held in tanks
until a Cabot truck arrives.
These trucks can come up to three times a day
to load up the supply of fresh milk
and transport it to the Cabot plant.
Here it will become either butter, cottage cheese,
sour cream, yogurt, or, of course, cheese.
Cheddar cheese.
It takes Cabot about 10 gallons of milk
to make just one pound of cheese.
To make Cabot's signature cheddar,
first the milk is pasteurized.
The milk is then poured into a huge vat
where a starter culture of bacteria
and a special enzyme called rennet are added in.
This combo jump-starts the process
of curdling the milk into cheese.
And as the cheese is formed, big steel wires
break it down into small curds
and a liquid known as whey.
Once the cheese curds are cooked through,
the whey and the curds head to the finishing table.
Here the whey is drained out.
Salt is added in to cut some of that acidity.
This is also the point where Cabot can add in herbs
and other ingredients to make their specialty flavors
like Super Spicy Habanero and, the cheese for us
weaker heat-seekers, the pepper jack.
After that, everything's mixed together.
Next, the cheese curds are squeezed together
to form massive 40- or 60-pound blocks.
Those blocks are then sent to the aging room
where they're left in a temperature-controlled space
to mature.
These folks are the cheese graders,
the people responsible for making sure Cabot's cheese
is aging up to their world's-best standard.
- On average in our inventory, we have
close to 70 million pounds of cheese
that we repeatedly will sample on an everyday basis.
Some days we're evaluating up to 150 samples or vats a day.
- When the cheese finally
makes it to the aging room, the cheese graders
take a plug, or a sample, out of each block.
- Good flavor.
That's a good Monterey jack, a little salty.
- Monterey jack is typically a short-aged cheese.
It's a younger cheese. It's got moisture added to it.
Make a unique profile.
- As the cheddar gets older, the flavors
that develop become more intense.
Every batch tastes a little bit different.
A thousand different farms, I mean,
the mix is always going to be a little bit different.
Cheese is a living organism.
- Graders like Gina and Ted
determine when a cheese block is ready to be cut.
The blocks head back to the factory
for the finishing touches.
An industrial slicer breaks those puppies down
to a more edible 8-ounce block.
Then it's sealed in plastic and boxed up in crates.
Those boxes of Cabot's signature cheese
and all 50 of their other flavors
will end up in stores across all 50 states.