How Many Pounds
of Really-Aged Cheddar?



Each Year, Harman's sells over 12 tons!

The story of our Aged Cheddar starts long before it comes to Sugar Hill. Each year, we contract with the Great Lakes Cheese Company of New York to make a delicious cheddar for us. We require that this cheese be made with first grass milk in late May or early June. May or June milk is rich in cream because the cows are changing their diet from winter hay to lush grass. In 2009, we signed a contract for about 26,000 pounds of cheddar but that cheddar won't be ready for delivery to Sugar Hill or sale to you until the summer of 2011! Right now the refrigerated warehouse in New York is housing (and aging) our 2008 and 2009 Cheddar.

Sometime this summer, when our walk-in cooler has enough space, we'll bring the 2008 Cheddar to Sugar Hill; about 13 tons will be in that load! Since we only get a delivery once a year, it's quite an event at the store. We even have neighbors and friends volunteering to help us with the unloading process. Even the neighbor's dog (above) had to stop and see what all the excitement was about. Even though we are a small operation, we manage to unload the truckload in a couple of hours or less. Our walk-in cooler has to be quite empty before we can bring the cheese here, because we will be bringing all of our 2008 Cheddar at one time!

  Last year, Nigel Manley, from The Rocks Estate in Bethlehem came over to help us unload the Cheddar. His crew thought that my figures were off or that Nigel had added a zero or two to them when he explained how much cheese we were receiving. On August 4, 2009; it was 27,498 pounds of Aged Cheddar (our largest shipment to date). It wasn't our smoothest unload as we had some technical difficulties but we still managed to get the job done in about 2 hours.

We get the truck lined up to our little store in the best position to put our rollers up to get the blocks of cheese from the truck to the walk-in. Even our rollers are a bit mismatched but they work. Our walk-in cooler is only so large so the cheddar blocks have to go in just the right way or they all won't fit. Each year, we manage to rework the formula to add a few more blocks but this year was too tight and we were thankful that Windy Ridge Apple Orchard turned their walk-in on early so we could store a few blocks of Cheddar Cheese over there. I took over some of the vintage 2006 Cheddar so that our walk-in would hold all of the 2007 Cheddar. This Fall, everytime we went over to pick up some apples to sell, we also brought back a block or two of our Cheddar. That's why this past autumn you were able to buy either 2007 (aged 2 years) or 2006 Cheddar (aged 3 years).

634 blocks of cheese made up that 27,498 pounds of vintage June 2007 Cheddar that we unloaded on a hot August day. In 2008, we only had 575 blocks delivered so the extra 59 blocks provided us a bit of challenge to fit in the cooler and also made us thankful when the the truck was empty and the last bit of Cheddar was in the cooler. I made it a bit more of a challenge by tucking about 850 pounds (20 blocks) of Vintage 2006 cheddar in the back corner of the walk-in. I'm saving that for special times during 2010. We'll cut some of it in March 2010 - watch for the postcard in the mail that will let you know when we are cutting it.