"The economics of a small farm weren't working. It couldn't be done."
Tim Stone grew up weeding the garden and looking after livestock on the Massachusetts farm his great-grandfather Galen bought in 1911. By 1987, when Stone was working in Washington, DC, he had a decision to make. The 400 acre property overlooking Buzzards Bay, which comprised of fields, forest, and wetlands, needed a new way to generate income. Stone wanted to keep the farm in the family, but just as important, he wanted the beautiful, biologically diverse cluster of ecosystems to remain free from commercial development. In the past, Stone's father and grandfather sold produce, meat, and fluid milk on the local market and frozen cow embryos internationally, but the farm couldn't compete with corporate agricultural giants that increasingly dominated the region. The loss of a livestock vet and nearby mechanics to service milking equipment was the final straw. Great Hill needed a way to stand out. Stone decided cheese was the answer.
Stone sold the farm's herd of cows and started asking folks nearby what kinds of cheese were missing from the local market. New England had lots of cheddar and bloomy rind cheeses, they said, but not much in the way of blue cheese. So Stone did his research and studied with one of the United States' leading experts on blue cheese, Howard Morris, a professor at the University of Minnesota. He developed a smooth, creamy rindless cheese with big blue flavor but none of the harsh, acidic bite that he noticed from other versions he tried. Great Hill Blue became the first cheese sold by Great Hill Dairy, and almost 30 years later, it remains the creamery's only offering. It's so good that Stone doesn't need to make anything else.
The secret to Great Hill Blue is the raw, non-homogenized milk used to make it. Most milk is processed in a way that breaks down its butterfat into tiny particles that are evenly dispersed through the liquid. This gets rid of the thick layer of cream that rose to the top of milk bottles in days of yore, and it makes the milk easier to process into cheese and other products. But Stone doesn't like the pungent flavor that forms when you make blue cheese with homogenized milk. His cheese is gentler on the palate. It tastes like the most luxurious blue cheese dressing you'll ever eat, with just enough acidity to cut through the richness. If blue cheese has scared you off in the past, you need to try Great Hill's version.
Great Hill Blue hit the market just as a new wave of the artisan cheese revolution was taking off. One of Stone's big breaks in the early 2000s came from making a deal with Bread & Circus, the local supermarket chain that later became Whole Foods. That deal led to meetings with other sellers that had significant buying power. "I was fortunate to start when this whole cheese thing was taking off," he says. "Larger stores that you'd never think would buy these kinds of products were introducing specialty cheese cases."
About 10 people work at the creamery with Stone these days, and the farm buys milk from a handful of small dairies in the area that have managed to survive even as their peers have had to sell their land. Stone points out that if a farmer can make it after decades of corporate consolidation around them, they must be doing something right. Supplying milk to creameries like Great Hill incentivizes these farmers to focus on quality dairy that doesn't just disappear into the anonymous fluid milk supply chain.
In 2024 the creamery made 153,000 pounds of blue cheese. Great Hill has produced about that much cheese for the past 15 years. That's the maximum they can do with the equipment and aging space they have, and it's allowed the creamery to reach a happy equilibrium where quality isn't sacrificed for greater volume. It's also allowed the farm to prosper and for its woods and wetlands to remain undisturbed. New England loses thousands of acres of forest to development each year, and conservationists are racing to preserve what's left. In this case, Great Hill's blue cheese is helping to protect a family farm and vulnerable wild spaces for future generations.
Will Great Hill ever make another kind of cheese to complement its standout blue? Probably not, Stone says. The molds that make blue cheese blue can wreak havoc with aging other styles, so the creamery would have to invest in a separate space to produce those cheeses. Instead, they're focusing on what works: a blue cheese unlike any other that tastes like what you imagine when you close your eyes and think of blue cheese. That's an achievement to make your ancestors proud.
Try Great Hill Blue, Great Hill's award winning blue cheese!
Creamery photos courtesy of Great Hill Dairy.
