Local newspaper and suggested they get up a city team. From there, the packers were created, with the packing plant sponsoring them. First, learn about green bays agricultural roots that led to the growth of its cheese industry, lending to wisconsins repetition of the cheese state. As the cheese state. Known assin is americas dairy line because we make the best cheese. We are looking at what we are looking at here is the milk intake room where the milk comes from the farmers, from the truck, into the silo. After the milk goes through the silo, it goes into the pasture riser. It heats up the milk to 161 degrees for 15 seconds. The purpose of the pasteurizer is to kill all harmful bacteria to humans. This cools down to 90 degrees heads to the vat. Right now, we are making gouda in vat number one. Gouda is processed is cooked slowly with hot water. The other cheese we make is cheddar, with steam. We make fontina with hot water as well. After that, we ditch it and make it, as you saw on the pictures before. Rake it as you saw in the pictures before. After that, we cut it in these molds. His is a four pound mold, to a real, to a loaf. Loaf. A wheel, to a this makes sure the acid goes through the cheese evenly. After the cheese is pressed for one hour, it goes to the brine room for two days. That is to salt the cheese evenly. That is why it is in water. Of the main ingredients for cheese other than milk and cultures, to give you your flavor. These are the wheels. This is probably our most popular sized cheese. These go from california to florida to boston, las vegas. After the cheese has been sitting in the brine for two days, we remove the cheese. Two days, we remove the cheese. These are two pounders for christmas. Then we go to the waxing part. All of our cheese is hand dipped. This is where we dip the twos, fives, fours, the wheels, and the loafs. My dad built this in 1925 and it has been in our family for all of those years. My dad worked in three different cheese factories before he bought his own. But he bought his own at a very early age, 24. From then on, he wanted a bigger factory. Chance to buy this site, here, when the previous factory burned down. He bought this site. They wanted to be close to a Cheese Factory, so the local farmers would haul the milk in. In the old days, farmers had their farms and they would bring their horses and buggies to the Cheese Factory. A fourmile trip with a horse and buggy was a big deal in those days. The industry developed in wasonsin from what homestead cheese, where each farm family made cheese for their own use. The men in the family were engaged in crop farming, mostly wheat. After decades, the soil became so depleted that the wheat crops were not profitable anymore and it was recognized that we had an ideal environment for raising dairy cattle. As wheat was unprofitable, more and more families turned to raising cattle. Cheese was really just a way to take that perishable product , the milk, which before refrigeration would only last about three days. Cheddar cheese would last a decade. It was a good way to market a perishable commodity. It was the late 1880s when the industry got started in wisconsin, and it was very much decentralized because it wasnt was only economical to transfer the milking cans as far as you could take a buggy and a in a half hour or 40 minutes. We were cheesemakers. That was our life, cheesemaking. It was an industry that had many changes. For example, when i was growing up, there were 2600 cheese factories in wisconsin. Now there are around 300. You can still see evidence of all these many cheese factories around wisconsin now. Generally, farmers in the neighborhood would build a would form a cooperative. They would build a Cheese Factory and higher a cheese cheesemaker. And the cheesemaker would work for the cooperative on shares. This created an adversarial relationship. The milk producers would adulterate their product with water. They did not necessarily always trust the cheese maker who marketed their product to give them a fair payment. So, consequently, because of the way the relationship was set up, the cheesemakers moved around a lot. As soon as the cheesemakers organized into cooperatives, they developed a way to market their cheese to the east. The railroad would transport the cheese to chicago. Ohio, pennsylvania, new york city. New york state was americas original dairyland. They got the cheesemaking industry developed a lot earlier in new york state. As the industry developed in wisconsin, there was a lot of rivalry between new york and wisconsin, as far as quality and volume of production. Is story about why cheddar yellow is that the wisconsin farmers wanted to distinguish their product from the cheddar made in new york, which was with, so they covered it annatto, giving it a higher fat content making it look like it had a higher fat content. They dyed it to look more like butter. We talk a lot about cheese culture. To make the solids in milk regulate, you need a lower ph, and a rennet enzyme. It pursues the fats in the cheese, one of the byproducts is acid, and that lowers the ph enough that you can make it with make the 10 solids in milk aggregate regulate coagulate into a solid mass. One of the worst things i have seen in my time is when penicillin came on the market. The penicillin is carried into the milk and killed the culture. And all ofo the vat a sudden, you would have a vat that was no good. Is likethe acidity, it eating a piece of wood. We had to find out what was causing it. There were a lot of meetings on that. That was the biggest problem we had in my time. In the early part of the century, a lot of cheesemakers would adulterate their product with fillers. This hurt the quality reputation of all the cheesemakers in wisconsin. There was a movement to organize and regulate the quality. The Cheese Exchange kind of grew out of that, because that allow that was a way to centralize the marketing and to allow the product to be graded and sold and stamped with the wisconsin brand. We apply that to a lot of the cheese is graded cheeses graded by the state. That Movement Really stemmed from an effort to improve the consistency of the product and guarantee the quality as it went to market. I think the program distinguished wisconsin and helped build a reputation of wisconsin as being a topquality producer. The state of wisconsin still is the only state that licenses cheesemakers. Maker program. We have a grading program a masteralso cheesemaker program. You have to apprentice for 10 years and have a panel of experts grade your product before you can get the masters mark. A lot of customers demand the wisconsin brand because it is recognized as a quality product, and the masters mark distinguishes the best of wisconsin cheese. I went to saint norberts and then the university of wisconsin and then got my job working for schreiber foods. In green bay, 1954. A long time ago. Schreibers at that time was a new industry. They started right after world war ii. Most of the bigger plants were a challenge, so you had to specialize in something. Thats why my dad always made and gouda, so we pushed that more. Kurds were a great advantage when they got popular because you could market them fast and then you were done with them. You dont have to handle it two or three times. You only handle it once, you know . We were involved in the production of cheeses and new ideas. We had new ideas and we would put those into play to produce a product. One idea was single slice, for example. You go to the store today and get a single slice. That was an innovative idea way back then. They have single slices. A customer could go to the store and take that wrapper off and have a slice of cheese. All beef patties. Pickles. Cheese. Lettuce and onions, sesame bun. Two all beef patties, special sauce, cheese, pickles on a sesame seed bun. Say that again. One of our major customers was mcdonalds. We were able to make that sliced cheese, and they could use it in their cheeseburgers. In the green bay area, there are eight internationallyknown large cheesemakers. We have seen a movement over the last maybe 10 years were people are really getting into more higher and varied cheeses with stronger flavors. Cheese plates are really popular for entertaining now. People have a real passion about cheese. We are hoping we can keep this going. And keep the we would like to get to 100 years. That would be maybe a five generation thing. I think we are in the top bracket of making cheese