It was Norman Steele, partner of the legendary cheesemaker Veronica, who said to us that being a cheesemaker was a calling where your aim was “Making a living making something that matters.”
Norman could coin a tasty aphorism and Veronica could make a tasty farmhouse cheese and, with Milleens cheese, they did just that.
Guided by their example and their practical help, so did all the Irish cheesemakers who followed their template of a lifestyle that involved hard, artisanal work guided by intuition, creativity and a genuinely alternative way of thinking and working.
When we first met these cheesemakers, the effect was like breathing a different oxygen. They were artisans, yes, but they were also artists, artists of the living world. They took a commonplace object – fresh milk – and made something extraordinary with it. But the extraordinary thing about Irish farmhouse cheeses is the fact that each one is different, and each one is created according to the personality and practice of the individual cheesemaker.
That might sound commonplace, but it isn’t. In most countries, for example, cheesemakers create cheeses according to the traditional template – in Emilia-Romagna, you make Parmigiano Reggiano and Grano Padano. In Normandy, you make Camembert. In Somerset you make Cheddar. But in Ireland, you can make whatever you like, whatever takes your fancy.
Dan Hegarty, chairman of CAIS, the association of Irish cheesemakers, likes to tell the story of a French dude who came to the farm at Whitechurch, north of Cork city, to work making Hegarty’s Templegall and Cheddar. “Why did you want to come to Ireland to make cheese?” Dan asked him one day. “Because Ireland is the Wild West of cheesemaking Dan!” he replied. And he was right.
For fifty years, Ireland has punkily been the Wild West of artisan cheesemaking, offering a heterogenous array of cheeses made on Irish farms by cheesemakers who follow their own lead. For almost forty years, we have been writing about these people, trying to understand how they do what they do. And for more than forty years we have been enjoying the cheeses, initially thanks to Monica Murphy’s shop The Cheeseboard, in Dublin.
But the cheesemakers haven’t just fed us. They have also exerted the most profound influence on how we think about food and creativity, and the way in which we try to write about these things.
Cheesemakers work in a world of pure creativity, using one material, which they bend, shape, manipulate and fashion according to their own temperament. What is extraordinary to us is the fact that once the template of the cheese is created, they can then replicate the cheese day after day.
But here’s the rub: milk is different every day of its life. Leave the poor cows out in the rain to get soaked, and the milk will be different. If they get freaked out by a storm, then the milk will be different. If the grass is abundant and the sun is shining, then the milk will be different.
But the cheesemakers take this in their stride, which has always struck us as being something akin to magic. How can you have consistency when your raw material is inconsistent, volatile, shape-shifting? A writer has the luxury of knowing that the alphabet and the thesaurus stay the same, so you can fashion your paragraph with the same understanding you had yesterday. The cheesemaker has no such luxury. And that, it seems to us, is akin to magic. The alchemical art, put into practice every day. The art of the improvisers.
The members of CAIS recently voted to award us their Special Recognition Award, a truly generous gesture considering that we are not cheesemakers. But, in a curious way, the award recognises that in our professional practice we have sought to emulate the way in which cheesemakers work. Take a medium – milk; words – and respond to it creatively and consistently. Try to make a living making something that matters.
These are the Best In Class Award winners from Cais Irish Cheese Awards 2026
New Cheese (All Styles & Milk Types): St. Tola Goat Cheese, Inagh, Co. Clare - ‘St. Tola Beag’
Raw Milk Cheese (All Styles and Milk Types): Coolattin Cheddar, Tullow, Co. Carlow - ‘Coolattin Mature Cheddar’
Fresh/Soft Cheese (Buffalo, Cow, Sheep, Mixed Milk): Dingle Farm, Dingle, Co. Kerry - ‘Cáisóg’
Goat Milk Fresh/Soft Cheese: Leitrim Hill Creamery, Drumcong, Co. Leitrim - ‘Cnoc Liatroma’
Soft/Semi-Soft Bloomy Rind Cheese (All Milk Types): St. Tola Goat Cheese, Inagh, Co. Clare - ‘St. Tola Karst’’
Washed Rind Cheese (Semi Soft, All Milk Types): Gubbeen Farmhouse Cheese, Schull. Co. Cork - ‘Washed Rind Gubbeen’
Blue Cheese (All Milk Types): Mike’s Fancy Cheese, Newtownards, Northern Ireland - ‘Young Buck’
Smoked Cheese (All Milk Types): Barbavilla Dairy, Collinstown, Co. Westmeath - ‘Smoked Provola’
Flavour Added Cheese: Killeen Farmhouse Cheese, Portumna, Co. Galway - ‘Killeen Goats Cheese with Fenugreek’
Hard/Semi-Hard Cheese Under 6 Months (All Milk Types): Killeen Farmhouse Cheese, Portumna, Co. Galway - ‘Killeen Mature Goats Cheese’
Mature Hard Cheese (All Milk Types): Killeen Farmhouse Cheese, Portumna, Co. Galway - ‘Killeen Extra Mature Goats Cheese’
Mature Farmhouse Cheddar (All Milk Types): Coolattin Cheddar, Tullow Co. Carlow - ‘Coolattin Mature Cheddar’
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