It's not every day a cheesemaker decides to throw open their doors and develop a cheese in public, but that's exactly what Jasper Hill Farms is doing with our 2012 Birth of a Cheese event. With a heady mix of amateurs and experienced cheese people across the country, making sure the feedback would be useful was a challenge. The first step? A questionnaire with guided instructions on cheese tasting.

Says Jasper Hill's Vince Razionale,

I wanted to encourage the tasters to step back and think about each facet of tasting: appearance, aroma, texture, flavor, and marketability - something we evaluate on each batch of each cheese we make and ripen. We do a lot of tasting around here, as you can imagine!

Not everything went as smoothly as hoped, though:

It was probably a bit premature to ask some of the marketability questions, as evidenced by the fact that some tasters couldn't wrap their heads around what it means to taste something that's not fully aged.

You can see the questionnaire below, and read the taster's responses at our blog.