Scott Fletcher, 47, has worked at the Grafton Village Cheese Co since 1967, and still oversees the cheese production. He takes great satisfaction producing high-quality, small-batch cheeses. Details of the process are described in this article.
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“It’s all Jersey” he said “Vermont Jersey, the best there is for Cheddar-High butterfat, high protein. An it’ll give us more cheese today. A good day.”
Oh sure, I’ve tasted other cheeses," Scott Fletcher is saying. "A few are pretty good. You know, there are some Cheddars that are made by fellows sitting in front of computers pressing buttons. They make more in a week than we make in a year. But their hands never touch cheese. I could never make cheese that way."
Fletcher is in his cheesemaking kitchen in a clapboard building on a country road in Grafton, a small village in the hills of southern Vermont. In a large steel vat, fresh milk from brown Jersey cows is being heated - the beginning of a process that will bring it to the point where he will consider it cheese.
Wearing starched white coveralls belted with a plastic apron, calf-high rubber boots, and a white hard hat that identifies him as "Fletch", this man who has been crafting Cheddar cheese by hand for the Grafton Village Cheese Company for thirty years gently lowers his forefinger into the milk, to which cultures and rennet have been added. It is gradually becoming quite like a custard. He extends his finger under the surface and lifts it out. "When it splits in a line, it’s ready," he says. "That’s how you tell. Few more minutes."
Fletcher is a big man with big shoulders, his face wreathed by reddish hair and beard, his eyes squints of satisfaction because he is happy with this morning’s flow of milk. "It’s all Jersey," he says. "Vermont Jersey, the best there is for Cheddar - high butterfat, high protein. And it’ll give us more cheese today. A good day."
Most of Fletcher’s working days are good, he suggests, because he is a contented man. He is unassuming, yet his pride in his job as head cheesemaker is evident. "It’s been a fine job for me. They say it builds muscles", he says, grinning. "It does. Never been laid off. We get busier every year, and every day there is the satisfaction of the finished cheese. I look around at the cheeses and I say I did that, with my hands. Then, when the cheeses get that two years of age... Man!"
Fletcher has never worked at anything else, never lived anywhere else but in this little niche of Vermont, except for his time in the Air Force. He was born in nearby Townshend, then lived in the crossroads town of Cambridgeport and later in Saxtons River, both tiny junctions along Route 121, the winding lane that leads to Grafton. Now forty-seven, he came to the cheese company in 1967.
His arrival coincided with a little wedge of Vermont history. Grafton, settled in 1780, had prospered as a farming and sheep-raising center and was once important enough to have had Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ulysses Grant, and Rudyard Kipling stop over on their stagecoach journeys from Boston to Montreal. The village also became home to what was then called the Grafton Cooperative Cheese Factory, created in 1892; local dairy farmers delivered their milk to the factory and received cheeses in return. In 1912 the cooperative was destroyed by fire, and cheesemaking ceased in that corner of Vermont. Grafton itself underwent an economic decline. Then, in 1963, a nonprofit organization called the Windham Foundation set about restoring nearly half of the town’s buildings. Four years later, with the help of the University of Vermont, the foundation rebuilt the cheesemaking facility, with steel instead of wood vats, and asked a local farmer and cheesemaker, Edward McWilliams, to reestablish the factory.
"That was Ed Senior", Fletcher says. "He hired me right out of high school. I graduated on a Wednesday, began full time the next Monday. You know, I didn’t really like cheese as a kid", he adds, laughing. "But a job was a job. Ed Senior showed me what to do and I worked with him and Ed Junior for years." Senior has passed away, Junior is retired, and Fletcher has moved into the top spot.
Just a minute", Fletcher says. Again he inserts his finger into the vat and lifts it out. "Almost there, almost there." Fletcher has been in his kitchen this morning since just after dawn to taste and touch, to begin the process that turns Jersey cows’ milk into blocks of Cheddar. The milk has been pumped, 1,500 gallons of it, into a steel vat and heated. "We don’t pasteurize the milk. Close to it, but it’s still considered raw. That’s the best for the cheese." He has brought the milk to 155 degrees Fahrenheit, cooled it to 80 degrees, then added culture-bacteria that starts fermentation. The mix is stirred by large rotating paddles for an hour and then rennet is incorporated. "We used to use animal rennet," he says, "from calves’ stomachs. We stopped that ten years ago because we couldn’t find it easily and it’s very expensive. Now we use one that is not animal-based."