Behind Cheese Tours
Cheese Tours started at High Weald Dairy for a fairly simple reason: I knew how much was happening behind the scenes, and thought people would enjoy seeing more of it.
Most people meet cheese at the end of the process, wrapped, labelled and sitting on a counter. The interesting bit is everything that happened before that.
The milk. The vats. The whey. The temperatures. The people making decisions. The rooms where cheeses sit for weeks or months changing almost invisibly.
That is the bit Cheese Tours tries to open up.
High Weald Dairy in Horsted Keynes is where the current tours take place.
It’s a working artisan dairy, not a visitor attraction built to look like one. On a Sunday the cheesemakers are not normally in full production, which means the group can move through areas of the dairy and get a much closer look at how the place works.
On production days, private groups may sometimes be able to see more happening, depending on the dairy schedule.
I’m Steve. I used to work at High Weald Dairy, so I know the place from both sides of the door.
What I enjoy most about the tours isn’t standing there giving people a speech. It’s the questions. Someone spots something, asks something I wasn’t expecting, somebody else joins in, and suddenly that particular tour goes off in its own direction.
That’s the bit I like.
I want people to understand what’s actually happening around them. How milk becomes cheese. Why one room feels completely different from another. Why something that looks simple on the surface can involve a ridiculous amount of judgement, timing and experience.
I’ve spent a lot of my working life speaking to audiences and helping other people communicate, so I suppose I naturally turn the complicated bits into stories people can actually follow. I’m not interested in making cheese sound clever for the sake of it.
There will probably be a few jokes along the way. None of them are planned. Some are considerably better than others.
By the end, if people are asking more questions than they were at the beginning, taking photos, arguing over their favourite cheese and looking at British cheese a little differently, then I reckon we’ve had a great tour.
British cheesemaking has an extraordinary amount of skill behind it, but most of us rarely get to see that side of it.
Cheese Tours is my way of making that world easier to understand, without turning it into a lecture.
If someone leaves knowing a bit more about how cheese is made, why British artisan producers matter and why their favourite cheese tastes the way it does, that’s enough for me.
