Wednesday, February 02
Rather an up and down week so far. On the up side, we've shipped out at least 30 wheels of cheese to various corners of the country; business is good, we're getting new accounts, and the block-layers have finally shown up to finish that running nightmare of a building project.
On the downside, we tasted the oldest batch of my mother's newest cheese from last year, the Galax, and it was horrible. Not just a bit off; horrible. Unsellable. We tasted out several other batches as well, and the first ray of hope is five batches down the list. That's over a thousand pounds of cheese we're probably going to have to throw out. To make it worse, we only made one batch of this type of cheese in 2003, and that batch was incredible and won awards and everybody's been asking for months when the new batch will be ready.
My mother is inconsolable. The rest of us are just depressed. It's a lot of cheese to toss with a lot of time and money and hard work sunk into it. To make matters worse we can't really figure out where we went wrong. The best guess is that our pH meter was not giving proper readings and so the acid didn't build properly during make when we thought it did, but that's something of a long shot.
Damn. It sucks when you don't find out about your mistakes until you've been making 'em for a year.
On the downside, we tasted the oldest batch of my mother's newest cheese from last year, the Galax, and it was horrible. Not just a bit off; horrible. Unsellable. We tasted out several other batches as well, and the first ray of hope is five batches down the list. That's over a thousand pounds of cheese we're probably going to have to throw out. To make it worse, we only made one batch of this type of cheese in 2003, and that batch was incredible and won awards and everybody's been asking for months when the new batch will be ready.
My mother is inconsolable. The rest of us are just depressed. It's a lot of cheese to toss with a lot of time and money and hard work sunk into it. To make matters worse we can't really figure out where we went wrong. The best guess is that our pH meter was not giving proper readings and so the acid didn't build properly during make when we thought it did, but that's something of a long shot.
Damn. It sucks when you don't find out about your mistakes until you've been making 'em for a year.
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