"Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!"

Today we took my inlaws on a driving tour of small cheese farms in a county about an hour north of us, near Vermont. There were six cheese farms that you could visit and we managed to make it to five of them.

We started at Gillis Acres Farm in Greenwich, a goat farm.

These little cuties are Alpine goats. We talked to the farmer about the cheese process, saw the equipment and the baby goats (the milking goats were in a different barn), and tasted all the cheese!

We decided to get the Alpine Queen which is similar to a gruyere.

Next we went to 3-Corner Field Farm in Shushan, a sheep farm. This was the first time I ever had to wash my shoes on the way in to a farm!

On the way in the gate, they have disinfectant buckets and scrub brushes and ask you to disinfect to protect the "bio security" of the farm. This farm is also all about sustainability, they have water pumps that do not use any fossil fuels, and solar panels on the barns for the refrigeration and milking/cheese making equipment.

Here's one of their cute sheep dogs taking a little break from his work...
And, here's the cheese we picked out. This is a smoked artisanal sheep's milk cheese and it is heavenly. It's also $22.50 a pound so we only got about a quarter pound.

This is getting long so I'm going to break it up into two posts...