Sometimes they're numerically clinical and other times they require a half-hour of family lore to understand. There's a lot that goes into naming a cheese, including personal pride and branding considerations. So how do cheesemakers make sure those names are as memorable as the cheeses they represent? Here are answers from 14 of our beloved creameries.
Finding family roots
Every one of our cheeses tells a story. Some are family stories, some are farm stories, and some are born from the landscape that surrounds us. Naming a cheese is never random—it’s a way of honoring where we come from and the people who made this life possible.
Family themes run deep. Eleven Brothers was our very first attempt at a hard cheese. Growing up with eleven brothers was its own kind of “hard,” but just like the cheese, they turned out wonderfully. The name felt inevitable, and fittingly, it’s now an award-winning cheese. Our world-winning blended-milk cheese, Gisele, is named after our mother. She raised 15 children, supported every dream, and taught us the value of hard work and heart. She deserves every bit of recognition we can give her.
We never tire of telling the story of how our parents gifted us “the girls”—the cows—along with this farm and 82 acres of grazing land. From that gift, we built the creamery, the caves, and a family life rooted in gratitude and craftsmanship.
Every cheese we make carries a piece of our history. When you taste them, you’re tasting our stories. — Anne Doe, Boston Post Dairy
Old World inspirations
Our cheeses are inspired by the cheeses of Europe, so we chose to also borrow the European tradition of regional names. Appalachian is named for the mountain range; Grayson is our county; Galax is our home city; and Mountaineer is a nod to the high altitudes and rolling hills we and our cows call home. — Kat Feete, Meadow Creek Dairy
Honoring history
For the most part our cheese names are pretty straightforward. Our six-month cheddar is aged for six months, our one-year cheddar is aged one year, and so on. However, to connect our cheese with the people who made it and who are important to our farm we have recently named our newest cheddar, Marshall’s Reserve, after one of the members of our team who was instrumental in shaping our organization into what it is today. It’s named after Marshall Webb who was one of our first cheesemakers in the 1980s. He passed away suddenly in 2022 and this was a way to commemorate his time that he gave to us. — Tom Perry, Shelburne Farms
Loving the local environment
We are inspired by the Chester County landscape that surrounds us! All of our cheese names honor what we see on a regular basis or a piece of history from the area. For example, Willow is named after a tree that sits in the middle of the cow's pasture and Seven Sisters is named after our original herd of seven Jersey cows that started our farm. — Meredith Langer, The Farm at Doe Run
Wisdom from the crowd
We have had fun crowdsourcing some of our newer cheese names. We draw on tradition for some of our cheese names including family connections to the old country. — Kerry Gewalt, Cobb Hill Cheese
Honoring makers
All our names mean something to the people who make the cheese. For example, one of our cheesemakers named "White Rock" for a town not far from where he lived. "Cave Dweller" was an inside joke between me and my brother. Each name is there because it meant something to us, not because we thought it would sell! — Dan Porter, FireFly Farms
Marking family history
Our cheeses are all named for places on and around our farm, where our family has milked cows since the early 1830s. We have kind of a bank of favorite place names —so many generations of creative, or maybe bored farmers—and when we're thinking about a new cheese, we see if one of those might fit. When Leslie suggested we try a fresh farmer's cheese, for example, freshness made us think about spring, and about what spots on the farm just get stunningly beautiful once everything's green again, and it was instantly obviously that we needed to name that cheese after the Emerson Meadow in our upland pasture. — Kate Leach, Woodlawn Creamery
And specific family members
We have named our cheeses after our family. Madison is named for a niece. Boucher Blue for the farm; the address, Gore Road, is where we live (Gore-Dawn-Zola). — Dawn Morin-Boucher, Green Mountain Blue Cheese
And especially the women
All of my cheeses are given a maiden name from my family or my husband's. I always say, if the name didn't get passed down to a kid, it goes to a cheese! It celebrates the matriarchal nature of dairy. It started with my husband's aunt Brie Quinby. I joked, "If I ever make a Brie, I should call it Quinby." And then I kept going from there. — Rebecca Velazquez, Barn First Creamery
A century of American history
Grafton Village Cheese was established in 1892, so our roots go back 134 years. Some of the names of our cheeses are based on what the product is, like Grafton Clothbound Cheddar and Maple Smoked Cheddar. Other names are a nod to our history and surroundings: Shepsog, the Algonquin word for sheep; Bear Hill, the small mountain that acts as a beautiful backdrop to our cheese plant; and Storyteller, an ode to Daisy Turner, a prolific storyteller and daughter of escaped slave Alex Turner who settled in Grafton on the south side of Bear Hill in 1873. — Meg Gonazalez, Grafton Village Cheese Co.
A tribute to the Dead
Well we wanted our first cheese to have a tie to the area (Stephentown, NY) and we also love music and the Grateful Dead. St. Stephen is an ode to Stephentown where our creamery is as well as a Grateful Dead song, so St. Stephen was definitely the name of our triple cream and it had the Saint too, which some notable triples also have. For the CamemBertha, yep, you guessed it. Bertha is a Grateful Dead song and CamemBertha is our take on a Camembert style cheese so it made perfect sense for us to use CamemBertha for that cheese. We hope to have a third cheese soon! — Shaleena Bridgham, Four Fat Fowl
Keeping it simple
Gouda itself is the hero of our cheeses, so many of our names stay simple and honest. When we create new varieties, we try to choose names that reflect the flavor or something meaningful to our farm or Dutch heritage. When we started, there was so much to focus on that all our attention went into making the best Gouda possible. Now, with a larger team, we also think about how names connect with customers because sometimes a traditional Dutch term like “belegen” doesn’t mean much to someone discovering our cheese for the first time. — Marieke Penterman, Hollands Family Cheese
Championing a taste of place
The Northeast Kingdom of Vermont as unique as our cheese. From historical people like Revolutionary War scout Moses Sleeper or philanthropic dairy farmer Alpha Tolman, to our contemporary community heroes like Anne Harbison and Sherry Grey—people are the stewards of our local culture. These names, along with geographical ones like Willoughby (Lake) and Bayley Hazen (military road) might perplex new customers, but we love that they signal one-of-a-kind, place-based cheeses. — Zoe Brickley, Jasper Hill Farm
And a love of words
Parish Hill Creamery cheese names are equal parts whimsy and homage. I love words. Vermont Herdsman is a cheese Peter has been making for almost 30 years, though sometimes under other monikers (ever heard of a whale of cheese called Rupert??) Humble was originally called Humble Herdsman, as a diminutive companion of the big guy. Only took a few customers ordering a 25-pound wheel of Vermont H. but thinking they had ordered a 4-pound wheel of Humble H. before we settled on just Humble!
West West Blue is a love letter to our village Westminster West. Reverie is the house next to the creamery. Kashar is the Turkish version of the stretched curd cheeses of the Mediterranean, and is the exception to the rule of not using the names of the inspiring cheeses. It doesn't mean anything to most people, but the folks that know that name are always delighted. Suffolk Punch was named for our friends' draft horses... but also they look like a speed bag for boxing. Hermit Thrush Brewery made the beer we used to wash Hermit. Wild Shepherd is the farm where we get our sheep milk. Dandy Charmer is washed with dandelion wine, and is charming:) Lillian and Jack's Blue were named in memory of our beloved dogs.
Cornerstone was the most aspirational of our cheese names. The Cornerstone Project is our dream of making a new american cheese: raw milk and autochthonous starters. There are a few Cornerstoners, and we hope others will see the value in this project laser focused on small production cheeses utterly unique to the maker... — Rachel Fritz Schaal, Parish Hill Creamery
Thanks to all the cheesemakers that participated in this roundtable! Learn more about all of them in our Farm Focus profiles, and shop our bestselling artisan cheeses here.
Photos courtesy of Boston Post Dairy, The Farm at Doe Run, Woodlawn Creamery, Barn First Creamery, and Jasper Hill Farm.
