cheeseunderground Andy Hatch, rush creek reserve, uplands cheese, Wisconsin, Wisconsin cheese

Rush Creek Reserve: It’s What’s for Dinner

Ahh, Christmas. That magical time of the year when I drown out the sound of my neighbor’s holiday yard light show by cranking Weird Al on the wireless speakers and eating Rush Creek Reserve for dinner. I’m sure I’m not alone – with either Weird Al or Rush Creek –  as cheese lovers everywhere are currently eating the results of a long season of hard work for one Wisconsin company.

That’s because between September and November, the cows in the dairy barn at Uplands Cheese near Dodgeville got more sleep than their owner, Andy Hatch, maker of two of the most famous cheeses in America: Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Rush Creek Reserve. In the morning, Andy and company made Pleasant Ridge Reserve, the farmstead cheese that put Wisconsin on the map, and then from late afternoon until long past sunset, they crafted my favorite soft, bark-wrapped cheese: Rush Creek Reserve. I heartily thank Andy and his crew for making cheese 17 hours a day this fall – I am truly consuming the love of their labor.


In case you don’t know the backstory of Uplands Cheese, as co-owner and lead cheesemaker, Andy is the dutiful caretaker of the company, founded in 1994 by Mike and Carol Gingrich and Dan and Jeanne Patenaude. More than 20 years ago, the farming couples joined their herds and transitioned to a seasonal, pasture-based system. Three years ago, Andy and business partner Scott Mericka purchased the operation. Scott oversees 244 acres of grass and is the herdsman for 150 milking cows. Cows eat the farm’s grasses and produce milk that Andy makes into seasonal cheeses.

For a city boy who grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Andy is a born farmer who didn’t realize it until arriving at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. While studying anthropology and environmental science, he became engrossed with the science of agriculture, working on area vegetable farms, starting a community garden, and writing a thesis on urban agriculture.

“I found I really liked working on farms,” Andy says. “If I could have figured out a way to start a farm, that’s what I would have done. But unless you grow up on or inherit a farm, it’s virtually impossible to hurdle the capital investment that starting a farm takes.”

With farming still in the back of his mind, Andy returned to Wisconsin to work at the Michael Fields Institute in East Troy. For one year, he assisted famed Dr. Walter Goldstein on a ground-breaking corn breeding program. While the work satisfied Andy’s scientific side, it didn’t get his hands outside and in the soil. He regretfully gave his notice. Instead of accepting his resignation, Dr. Goldstein sent him to live with his mother-in-law in Norway.

“Working with Dr. Goldstein was an incredible experience, but I what I really wanted to do was farm. He knew that. So he sent me to Norway to stay with his recently widowed mother-in-law and help her get the family farm in shape to sell. I really had no idea what was in store for me,” Andy says.

He had traveled to Europe twice before with his parents, both wine enthusiasts, but he had never been to Norway. Immediately, the remoteness of staying with a 70-year-old woman named Unni on a fifth-generation goat dairy with no car, no computer, and no phone in the fjords of west Norway cleared his mind. He spent mornings hand milking 14 goats, never having milked an animal before. “For the first week, the muscles in my forearms were so sore I couldn’t grip a fork at supper,” Andy says.

After morning milking, Andy helped make cheese in a tiny, but surprisingly modern stainless steel vat in a small building 300 yards from the ocean. The routine of milking and making cheese suited him. Andy learned how to make cheese via sight, smell, and touch. He made hard, aged goat’s milk cheeses, which Unni sold to tourists at the ferry landing. After the daily dose of cheesemaking, Andy spent the afternoon in a hut stirring the day’s whey in a pot over a fire to make geitost. By evening, it was time to milk the goats again, eat a simple supper, and collapse into bed on a mattress stuffed with straw.

He stayed three months, long enough to help Unni settle affairs to sell the farm and make him a pair of socks from the hair of the farm dog, a Norwegian reindeer-herding pup named Knatchean. “It took me a month to learn how to say the dog’s name,” Andy says. He still has the socks.

From Norway, instead of going home, Andy headed to southern Europe. He had caught the cheesemaking bug. He roamed two years, making mountain cheeses in Austria, sheep cheeses in Tuscany, and goat cheeses in Ireland. He stayed a season or two in each location, earning his keep during the day with his cheesemaking labor, and earning a few coins at night by playing mandolin and fiddle in local taverns. For two years, he couldn’t decide which path to take: musician or cheesemaker. And then came a call from home.

“My mother called with the news that my dad was very ill, so I got on the first plane home and spent the summer with him in the hospital,” Andy says. That fall, his parents spent time recuperating at the family cottage in Door County. Andy followed and met Caitlin, an artist who became his wife. He took an agricultural short course at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, milked cows on area dairies, and apprenticed with cheesemakers to earn his Wisconsin cheesemakers license. He accepted a cheesemaking job at Uplands in 2007, married Caitlin in 2009, and, with her, copurchased Uplands Cheese three years ago, moving into a house on the Uplands farm. It’s where they are now raising their two children.

“Cheesemaking is the vehicle that allows me to stay on the farm,” Andy says. “It also satisfies my creative impulses, which is one of the reasons I spend so much time working on Rush Creek Reserve.”

Inspired by his experience of making Mont d’Or in the Jura region of France, Rush Creek Reserve is a serious, all-consuming labor of love. Andy cuts and stirs large curd by hand to protect its soft and delicate nature, and hand ladles curd into forms. It is then flipped, and drains overnight. The next morning, wheels are brined and handwrapped by spruce bark that’s been boiled and soaked in yeast and molds. As a raw milk cheese, Rush Creek is aged 60 days and then immediately shipped to retailers. It’s the type of cheese that, when eaten, is designed to be warmed with the top removed, and enjoyed with a spoon or bit of bread.

In Madison, Rush Creek Reserve is available right now at several outlets, although obviously I’m a bit partial to Metcalfe’s Markets. I even put bows on every wheel we sell at our Hilldale store.

As Andy and Caitlin look to the future, I’m sure they wonder if either of their children will want to be cheesemakers. In any case, Andy is planning on teaching them to play the violin and mandolin, his second great love to cheesemaking. His band, Point Five—a local group of musicians playing traditional, acoustic Americana music—plays numerous gigs in the region. “We’ve got enough instruments in this house that the kids will be able to play whatever they want to,” Caitlin says. “And if they’re lucky,” Andy adds, “I’ll even sing along.”

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Rush Creek Reserve Production Stopped By FDA Rule Uncertainty

Andy Hatch with one of his first experimental batches of
Rush Creek Reserve on May 20, 2010. The cheese was
officially released that fall to great acclaim. Photo by
Jeanne Carpenter

Uncertainty over how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will rule in regards to a number of pending raw milk cheese regulations has claimed its first official victim: Rush Creek Reserve by Uplands Cheese near Dodgeville, Wisconsin.

In an email to industry professionals this morning, Uplands co-owner and lead cheesemaker Andy Hatch broke the sad news that he will not be making Rush Creek this year.

“It’s disappointing news, I know, and we hope that it’s not permanent. Food safety officials have been unpredictable, at best, in their recent treatment of soft, raw-milk cheeses, and until our industry is given clear and consistent guidance, we are forced to stop making these cheeses,” Andy said.

Andy added it’s not a decision he and his team came to easily. “Hopefully, our government officials will soon agree on how to treat traditional cheesemaking, and we can all return to the cheeses that are so important to us.”

So what would make one of America’s most awarded cheese companies stop production of a cheese that debuted four years ago to great acclaim and that the New York Times described as “fluent and satiny, with a rich, slightly grassy aroma and a mild flavor that hints of smoke and pork.”?

Let us count the ways:

1. The FDA is currently reviewing the 60-day aging rule it imposed in 1949 on American cheesemakers making raw milk cheeses, with many academics speculating the rule will be increased to 90 or 120 aging days within the next year. For an excellent recap and history of how the current 60-day raw milk cheese rule came into being, check out this article by Bill Marler. Remember, Rush Creek Reserve is a raw milk cheese aged 60 days. It is patterned on the magnificent Vacherin Mont d’Or, of which I consumed an entire wheel at one sitting while in London on April 4. No regrets.

2. The newest focus of FDA food safety officials appears to be enforcement of non-toxigenic E.Coli levels in raw milk cheese. Unbeknownst to almost anyone in the industry, in 2010, the FDA changed the standard (see top of page 7) for non-toxigenic, E.Coli in raw milk from  less than 10,000 to  less than 10 MPN per gram. This happened even after the FDA’s own policy review team (see top of page 7) in 2009 suggested lowering it to only “100 MPN per gram in two or more subsamples or greater than 1,000 MPN per gram in one or more subsamples.” The FDA has begun to enforce this new policy by purchasing raw milk cheeses from distributors, testing them for pathogens, and then showing up at cheese factories for a 3-day investigative inspection. Every cheesemaker I talked to says it is virtually impossible to consistently produce a raw milk cheese with less than 10 parts of non-toxigenic E. Coli per gram. Goodbye, raw milk cheese.

3. Aging cheese on wooden boards may or may not be a dead issue. Two months ago, after a mid-level FDA bureaucrat declared the agency would no longer permit American cheeses to be aged on wooden boards, the entire U.S. cheese eating population erupted in an uproar that made the FDA back down just three days later. In Wisconsin alone, 33 million pounds of cheese are aged on wooden boards, including Rush Creek Reserve.

So to recap, between raw-milk aging rules, new pathogen policies, and the threat of whether the FDA is really backing down on the use of wooden boards, one of America’s great cheeses is no more. The death of Rush Creek Reserve should act as the canary in the coal mine for all American raw milk artisan cheeses, because just as our great American artisan cheese movement is in serious full swing, the FDA has basically declared a war on raw milk cheese.

P.S. Mind you, of course, the FDA pubicly insists they have nothing against raw milk cheese. At the American Cheese Society conference in Sacramento in July, a total of seven – yes seven – officials from the FDA politely attended a public luncheon after meeting privately with the ACS board of directors. Their fearless leader, Mike Taylor, FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine, spoke to us industry professionals for 45 minutes at the luncheon. What he said can best be summed up with his opening words: “We are from the government and we’re here to help you.”

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A New Day at Uplands Cheese

Uplands Cheese, home to the much-awarded Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese, is officially under new ownership. Cheesemaker Andy Hatch and Herdsman Scott Mericka, both of whom began as apprentices years ago at Uplands, announced today they have purchased the dairy farm and cheese company from its founders, Mike Gingrich and Dan Patenaude.

Most industry folks know that Hatch and Mericka have been managing the farm since 2010, leading to a gradual transition to the new management. Andy says the official papers were signed in February, and Uplands Cheese now officially belongs to a new generation.

Mike and Carol Gingrich are pleased with the transfer. “This has been a long time in the works and we couldn’t be more pleased to see the farm, the cows and the cheese pass into such capable hands,” Mike says.

Uplands Cheese was founded in 2000, when Gingrich and Patenaude began crafting Pleasant Ridge Reserve with the grass-fed milk of their cows. In 2001, the cheese vaulted to fame after winning the coveted Best of Show award at the annual American Cheese Society competition. It repeated the honor in 2005 and again in 2010, while also being named U.S. Champion Cheese in 2003. To date, Pleasant Ridge Reserve is the only cheese to have won ACS Best of Show three times, and is the only cheese to have won both of the major, national competitions.

Hatch, who has overseen cheese production since 2007, believes the Pleasant Ridge Reserve crafted today is better than ever. “We’ve continued to improve our pastures and our herd, and every year we refine our work in the ripening rooms, to the point where almost every batch is as good as the standout batches of several years ago,” he said.

Pleasant Ridge Reserve is made only in the summer months, while the farm’s cows are on pasture. In 2010, Hatch added a second cheese to the Uplands repertoire. Rush Creek Reserve is a soft-ripened cheese wrapped in a strip of spruce bark and made with the hay-fed milk of autumn months. Rush Creek Reserve cheese quickly attainted cult status in the cheese world, and continues to sell out quickly each November and December, when it’s sold across the country.

Congratulations to Uplands Cheese! We can’t wait to see what you do next.