Harpersfield Farmstead Cheese with Ommegang Ale
A food review by Daniel B.
Everyone wants to pair wine with cheese. It’s understandable. When a wine and cheese pairing work, each product is improved, and it is a remarkable experience. But when a pairing fails, the weaknesses of each are amplified.
Wine is a lot harder to pair with cheese than most people suspect. And it’s even harder to pair a single wine with an entire cheese plate. Beer on the other hand, is a lot more flexible and pairs well with a wide variety of cheeses.
One tip for picking pairings has always been using geography as your guide. If you are eating an Alsatian cheese, it’s likely to go well with an Alsatian wine. The beers of England go great with British cheese. North of the Catskills they are taking this truism one step further, as the Brovetto Dairy is using the local beer to make its cheese.
The Brovetto Dairy crafts Harpersfield Cheese from the milk of their herd of Holsteins. These animals graze on pasture and the milk is produced without artificial growth hormones. The later is just nice to know, but the former qualifies the operation as a farmstead cheese maker, something the French refer to as Fermier.
That’s a good thing.
Harpersfield Cheese is modeled after a European cheese named Tilsit. But that provides precious little information because this cheese has traveled around the continent and been adapted at each stop. Steve Jenkins tells its story in the Cheese Primer:
Tilsit was originally made in a village of the same name, by Dutch cheesemakers who had emigrated to what was then East Prussia (Sovetsk), a part of U.S.S.R. Today, the town of Tilsit is officially in Lithuania, where its link to a namesake cheese is all but forgotten. However the cheese has definitely survived; in addition to the Danish version, it is also made and consumed in great quantities in Germany. The definitive Tilsit, however, is the well-crafted Swiss version–now known as Swiss Tilsit but formerly called Royalp–which is exported in small quantities.
Our local version is billed as semi-hard, but is decidedly on the softer side of the spectrum, with a mild and tangy flavor. Which is why it works well as a base for other flavoring agents. The Brovettos take full advantage of this by offering an array of flavored versions containing everything from caraway seeds to lapsang souchong.
But the piece I sampled was washed with Ommegang’s Abbey Ale. And if you’ve never had the chance to drink some, it’s a very special beer.
The aroma of this cheese was dominated by a very pleasant yeastiness. It’s a relatively young cheese, aged for well under a year, and it is lacking a very well developed rind. It’s just the lightest hint of orange from being washed with the beer, and it is edible without displaying the intense grittiness present in some other washed rind cheeses. But it does have a similar flavor profile to those in its class. While not as pungent as Munster or as beefy as Taleggio, it is redolent of both.
Harpersfield also reminds me of another Dutch cheese called Kernhem in texture. They are both firmer than semi-soft and softer than semi-hard. Kernhem means “knife stick” and when cutting Harpersfield, you will notice how it too will stick to your cheese knife.
I enjoyed this cheese when paired with grilled sausages or just on its own. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Harpersfield goes great with beer. Preferably one from Ommegang if you can find it. But some people down in Brooklyn re-soaked the cheese in their local beer, so that promises to be a delightful pairing as well.
About Daniel B.
A west coast transplant now living in Albany, Daniel Berman is applying his communication strategy background to food writing with the ultimate goal of improving the culinary landscape in the Capital Region. He writes the FUSSYlittleBLOG and contributes regularly to All Over Albany.