🏭 Cheese dairy

A cheese dairy is a place where cheese is made. It can be a small workshop on a farm or a large cheese factory. In English, cheese made on a farm from its own milk is called farmstead cheese.

A cheese dairy has vats where the milk curdles, tools for cutting the curd, moulds, presses, brine baths and ripening rooms. A ripening room is a cool room with the right humidity. The cheese sits there on shelves and matures. It is looked after: turned, wiped and sometimes washed with brine. This part of the work is called affinage.

For a long time cheese dairies were small. The first factory for industrial cheese production opened in Switzerland in 1815. In 1851 Jesse Williams, a farmer in New York State, began making cheese in an assembly-line way, collecting milk from neighbouring farms. This made cheese one of the first factory-made foods in the USA. Today more than a thousand kinds of cheese are made around the world. Cheese from whole cow's milk alone came to 22.6 million tonnes in 2022.