A cheese festival in Jackson County celebrates cheese makers in Oregon.
courtesy of Katie Bray
A celebration of cheese is shaping up in Central Point. The festival on Saturday and Sunday will showcase cheese created across Oregon. Katie Bray is the executive director of the Oregon Cheese Guild. She said the event allows cheese lovers to learn more about the artisan selections made in places like the Willamette Valley and Southern Oregon. She joins us with details.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: We end this week with cheese. The Oregon Cheese Festival is being held tomorrow and Sunday at the Jackson County Expo in Central Point. It’s put on by the Oregon Cheese Guild and features almost two dozen creameries. Katie Bray is the executive director of the Oregon Cheese Guild and she joins me now. Katie Bray, welcome to the show.
Katie Bray: Thanks, Dave. Happy to be here.
Miller: It’s great to have you on. What can people expect at the event this weekend?
Bray: So we bill the festival as a celebration of cheese and everything that goes with it. So we have 110 vendors, as you mentioned, about 20 of them are cheese. And everybody will have samples out and then you can also taste everything else that goes with cheese: Adult beverages, we’ve got beer, wine, cider, we’ve got sauces, jams, jellies, nuts, mushrooms, and kombucha and all kinds of delicious things. So, anything that you might find on a cheese board or in that specialty section at the grocery store.
Miller: Do you have any advice for people who, in terms of pacing themselves as they work their way through the work of 20 creameries?
Bray: Well, the show goes for five hours.
Miller: (laughter) Just divided up by five hours.
Bray: You bet. We’ve got them organized into these three vendor pods and we try to have a cheese maker and a beverage and then an accompaniment at each one so that you can put together pairings and try things together and see what you like to taste the best.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the breadth or the diversity of cheese types that are made within Oregon?
Bray: So the Guild is a nonprofit association that represents Oregon’s artisan cheesemakers and we typically hover right around 20 members. So we’re not huge in terms of number, but we’ve got some pretty heavy hitters out there. We represent everybody from a little teeny tiny cheese maker that is a so associated with a winery down here in the Applegate that’s called Crush Pad Creamery that sells everything that they make right in their tasting room all the way up to Tillamook, which is represented through their premium artisan line of Maker’s Reserve cheeses. And within that range of sizes, we’ve got tons of different styles so there are people making cheese from sheep’s milk, goat’s milk cow’s milk making, you’re kind of what you would expect like French style or Italian style cheeses, plenty of Cheddars. We’ve got one maker making Mexican style cheeses right out of Salem. Anything that you can think of. One of the greatest things about my job is that these cheese makers aren’t in competition with each other. They really work together to help support each other and the rising tide lifts all these boats.
Miller: What’s a small-scale Oregon cheese that you think Oregonians need to know about all of them?
Bray: (laughter) All of them! I would say, check out your local farmers market for sure, because we do have several makers who you can’t even find at your retailers. We’ve got two out in eastern Oregon, for example, who are in Milton-Freewater. So you’d only be able to find them at their shop there or at the farmers markets there, likewise in Southern Oregon and then kind of dotted all along the I5 corridor. Smaller end, I would say La Mariposa is one of them. It’s a second generation Argentine cheesemaker who relocated here to Oregon about 20 years ago and has been making cheese here. They’ve got a beautiful butterfly on their label. They are a lot of fun. River’s Edge Goat Dairy is just this bucolic, perfect farm out near the coast in a little town called Logsden and she’s making French style bloomy rind goat cheeses that are just gorgeous.
Miller: Can you give a sense for the scale of these producers compared to
Tillamook?
Bray: They range the gamut. So we did some internal research a few years ago and it’s going to be hard to have an appreciation for the scale. It’s in thousands of pounds per year of production that we asked them about. And of our 20 makers, we have four who produced more than 350,000 pounds of cheese per year. Tillamook was even a multiplier factor of that. But then under 350,000 pounds per year, there was a huge gap and the next biggest producer after those top four only made 150,000 pounds of cheese per year. So all the rest are at that small scale and there’s just not anything in the middle. It’s pretty interesting.
Miller: How did the Cheese Festival pivot during the pandemic when people were–in March of 2020–-not milling around at the expo, all breathing on each other and eating cheese together?
Bray: Yes. And in fact, in 2020, we were slated to be–I can’t remember the exact dates–but we were setting up for a March 14 and 15th festival. So we saw this train coming down the tracks, but we were going forward, operating as if it was going to have and we actually had to pull the plug 48 hours before we opened our doors. So we had sold all the tickets, the tents were going up, we had cheesemakers in the air flying down here for this thing and it was just devastating for the Guild, for our producers and everybody involved. That was a tough year. Then in the fall when it was clear that we were not going to be able to come back in person for any of our events, we had seen another industry association do a really cool combination of an assembled sampler pack, like a to-go-kit, along with a virtual tasting live tasting over Zoom and on Facebook live. So we did that model twice in 2020, once in The Wedge, which is our Portland Festival that happens in the fall. And then we liked it so much that we did it again for the holidays and we’ve continued to do that at the holidays because people have liked this concept. So we asked all of our makers to choose one cheese that they put in the kits. We make up 500 of these kits and they have 15 cheeses and four accompaniments and we sell those. Then people have a link or they can just tune into our Facebook page for the Facebook Live Tasting and the videos from our producers talking to their cows out in the fields or sharing a recipe with their cheese along with some live interviews and extra segments. It’s a lot of fun to do.
Miller: You were talking earlier about the creameries in Milton-Freewater or on the coast or in Southern Oregon, all over the place. There is a cheese trail map so people can go around and visit all these places, but It seems really different than say the fruit loop around Hood River, which is this concentrated place, for agriculture or food-based tourism. Does that make it harder for you to get people to go out? And we have about 40 seconds left for you to answer that question.
Bray: Okay. Yes, that was one of the things that we noticed when I came to the Guild eight years ago and the map that they had at the time was with these little folks all over the place in the state and there wasn’t really a core for food lovers to go there for. So what I did was try to help find some other food companies like for example, out in Bandon we have Face Rock Creamery, but we found a little chocolate maker and a jam maker who were also there and brought them into the map with us so there’d be a little food cluster there in the town.
Miller: Katie Bray, thanks very much.
Bray: Come out to see us at the festival this weekend. It’s gonna be awesome.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.