Growth: The New Pasteurizer

We’ve been selling our cheese as fast as we can make it (and age it), so it’s pretty clear we could make and sell more.  But making it in 8 gallon batches is labor intensive.  The yield is about 7 pounds.  It takes the same amount of work no matter how big your batch is: 1 gallon or 1,000 gallons.  So we’ve been looking for a way to increase our capacity.

We’ve also had a lot of requests for cheeses that require pasteruzation.  Right now, we only make cheeses that age at least 60 days, which can legally (and safely) be made from raw milk.  But those soft, spreadable cheeses everyone loves require pasteurization.  In order to make a consistent Brie, we would also need to pasteurize.  So we wanted a vat that doubled as a pasteurizer.

This week, we found one: a 150 gallon batch pasteruizer that will double as a cheese vat.  At about $8,000, it wasn’t cheap.  But considering most models in this size range start at about $15,000, I think we did pretty well.  It’ll ship from the midwest later this week, and hopefully in another 3-4 weeks we’ll have a working pasteurizer.

Growth is difficult.    Now that we’ll be making more cheese, we’ll need bigger milk storage equipment, more space, and eventually a bigger cheese cave.  All of that costs money.  The projections look good, but it’s still scary to spend so much of our savings.

The good news is, to keep our new vat busy, we’ll be buying cow’s milk from a local dairy in the next town, so we’ll be exanding our product line as well!