MCKINLEYVILLE, Calif. — Mary Keehn's start in the goats' milk cheese business was a minor aspect of her Alpine goat showing days. Twenty-some years ago, she was showing her goats in competitions across the country, racking up national championships and selling her award-winning goats for breeding stock. Making cheese was just something she did for family and friends as a way to use the milk.

"The milk was kind of a by-product of what I was doing," Keehn says. "I think that's how a fair number of people got into making goat cheese."

However, a friend opening a Northern California restaurant told Keehn that if she started making cheese commercially, the restaurant would be her first customer. Keehn took her friend up on the offer, and the rest, one might say, is history. The result was the opening of McKinleyville, Calif.-based Cypress Grove Chèvre in late 1983, a goats' milk cheese company that has come to be widely known in specialty foods circles for its first cheese — fresh chèvre — as well as for its more recent additions such as Humboldt Fog, a mold-ripened cheese with an outer covering of ash.

• Waiting for the world to discover goats' milk cheese

With nearly 17 years under her belt at Cypress Grove Chèvre, Keehn has seen her company — and the goats' milk cheese industry — dramatically grow and develop.

Today, Keehn and her daughter, Malorie McCurdy, operate a cheese business that has grown 30-40 percent each year for the past six years, and they plan to soon build another facility to keep pace with the demand. However, such strong demand wasn't always the case. When she first started the company, Keehn — who taught herself cheesemaking by reading and trial and error — found that there wasn't a lot of demand for cheese made of goat's milk.

Originally, Keehn made cheese from milk produced only by her own herd of goats — 50 Alpines that produced about a gallon and a half of milk daily. That's a lot of milk for a goat, but in aggregate it's not a lot of cheese.

"But even at that, we couldn't find a home for all of the cheese," Keehn says.

In the early 1980s, there just wasn't a lot of demand for goats' milk cheese, she explains.

"Early on, when we did the 'Fancy Food Show' it was nothing like it is now," Keehn says, explaining that the company didn't get a lot of attention at first. "Now the booth's crowded."

The company's namesake fresh chèvres were what attracted the most attention. Interest in mold-ripened cheeses was just about nil.

"Goat cheese was odd enough (in the early 1980s) without adding mold," she adds with a rueful chuckle.

With interest in goats' milk cheese lackluster, growth for the company happened gradually.

"It took about four years before we were anywhere near profitable," she says.

• Growing and adapting to meet demand

But growth did eventually come. In the latter half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, goats' milk cheese began to become more popular. In the meantime, Cypress Grove Chèvre also had begun building a distributor network. Cypress Grove's first distributor was Hayward, Calif.-based Columbus, a company whose interest in the cheese proved to be a turning point for Cypress Grove.

"They kind of took us under their wing or we probably would have gone out of business," Keehn says.

Today, Cypress Grove maintains strong ties with Columbus as well as a number of other distributors. The cheese is popular with foodservice, Keehn says, estimating that about 60 percent of the cheese goes to foodservice with the remaining 40 percent being sold at retail. She credits the cheese's success to both its quality and the distributor network.

"We need distributors who take care of the product," she says.

In the early 1990s, Keehn also sold her entire herd so that she could put additional focus on the small but growing cheesemaking business.

Cypress Grove remains involved in the milk production side of the business, though, by staying in close contact with its five producers. The company picks up the milk from these producers in a flatbed truck retrofitted with a milk tank on top; doing so is one important way of keeping in touch with them on a regular basis, Keehn says. Each of the producers is growing, she adds, noting that she anticipates each will be milking 200-300 goats by next year.

However, Keehn and McCurdy also want to get back into the milk production side of the business, and a new production facility will allow them to do that.

With demand in the past few years picking up so dramatically, Cypress Grove plans to build a new plant this next year to allow the company to meet that demand.

Since its beginnings, Cypress Grove has operated out of a small 3,500-square-foot facility on what had previously been a chicken ranch.

"We've been here all along and remodeled and remodeled. So we're excited to build something exactly the way we want," Keehn says.

Cypress Grove will build a 8,000-9,000-square-foot plant on a 26-acre site near the current facility. Doing so will give the company the room it needs for making more of its handmade cheese, each individually ladled into molds.

• Teamwork and attention to detail are hallmarks of success

The fact that all of Cypress Grove's cheese is handmade is part of the reason why the company needs more space. After the milk is pasteurized, it is pumped into 20-gallon vats so that the curd can later be ladled without breaking.

"Goats' milk cheese curds are a little more fragile than cows' milk curds, so you can't afford rough handling," she says. "It takes a fair amount of floor space to make cheese this way, but we've found it makes the best-textured cheese."

Eight-ounce ladles are then used to fill the molds, among the steps requiring substantial manpower. Cypress Grove has 14 employees, and the plant operates seven days a week. After the curd sets in the molds, the cheese is turned out and salted. The chèvre then is ready to begin the aging process. Fresh chèvre is kept in the cooler for about a week, during which time it is turned every other day to help it dry.

Keehn stresses that it's teamwork that helps make the company a success. The person who washes the molds may not believe it, but that person is one of the most important on the staff because that job is integral to the cheese's quality.

The staff works together when developing new cheeses, Keehn also notes.

"Whenever we do anything specific like change a culture, we spend a lot of time discussing it," she says. "We make the cheese six or eight different ways and almost always come up with one everyone likes the best."

The staff also pays attention to every detail during this process, she says.

"We don't just buy a culture off the shelf," she says, explaining that the company mixes cultures for its own unique cheese.

"For us, cheese is an art form," she adds.

• New ripened cheeses rack up awards

With this mindset, it's not surprising that Cypress Grove offers chefs and retailers unusual cheeses with fanciful names such as Marble Mountain and Mt. McKinley — the company's newest introductions.

These two cheeses, with their upright pyramid shapes lending to their tall mountain names, were both introduced last year, Keehn says. Marble Mountain is an 11-14 ounce cheese with a creamy, light but earthy flavor which gets more complex with age. The cheese was named the Best American Original Goat Cheese in the 1999 American Cheese Society (ACS) Competition. Meanwhile, Cypress Grove's website describes Mt. McKinley as a sharp, deep, earthy and nutty flavored cheese with goat "overnotes."

Also growing in popularity is the company's Humboldt Fog, an award winner in the ACS competition in 1997 and 1998.

In fact, Humboldt Fog has become so well-known that Keehn says that there have been times when people have referred to the company as "Humboldt Fog" instead of Cypress Grove.

It's a different world compared to 15 years ago when people turned up their noses at mold-ripened goats' milk cheeses.

"Fresh chèvres are still the majority of our business," Keehn says. "But four or five years ago we tried the ripened cheeses again, and this time they took off.

"All of the cheeses are doing well, but it's the ripened cheeses that have been really growing," she adds.

CMN