Hidden Cheese Caves in Brooklyn Hold 28,000 Pounds of Cheese

Editor’s note: Sadly Crown Finish Caves (located inside 150-year-old beer tunnels in Brooklyn) is closing and will hold their last pop up market on Friday, May 27th, 2022. We hope someone else may take over this business that produced such wonderful cheeses!

Crown Finish Caves

Thirty feet below the sidewalk of a quiet stretch in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights is a network of tunnels that have been there for more than 150 years. The tunnels, which were originally built to ferment beer, now hold 28,000 pounds of aging cheese. This is Crown Finish Caves, a cheese aging facility making top-quality cow, sheep, and goat milk cheese with producers from across the United States, Italy, and Spain.

Married couple Benton Brown and Susan Boyle bought the building back in 2001, but it took them nearly 15 years to figure out what to use the hard-to-access tunnels for. Around 2010, Benton got interested in cheese making as a hobby and went to Vermont to learn the craft under Parish Hill Creamery’s Peter Dixon. But when all the cheesemakers he spoke with mentioned there wasn’t really a need for more cheesemakers, and what they did need was space for aging their cheese, he knew he had the answer.

He and Boyle started construction on the caves, retrofitting them for cheese aging. “Because we're so far underground, we have a year-round temperature of about 55 degrees, without having to do anything,” says sales manager Caroline Hesse. Still, to be FDA compliant and ensure everything is food-safe, they had to install systems that monitor and control temperature, humidity, and air filtration, as well as build shelves and treat the walls. In 2014, they were ready to bring in some cheese, and started with a partnership with Parish Hall, initially focusing on raw milk cheese. “We really wanted to start our program off with raw milk cheese because we wanted to bring all of those flora and microbes into our caves because it does take a little bit of time to really get a cheese cave to actively make delicious cheeses,” says Hesse.

Word of the cheese cave spread and by 2016, they were working with five or six different producers on the East Coast, and were at max capacity in one cave, which meant 28,000 pounds of cheese. A second cave, up until COVID, was being used for events like live music and talks (with half of the proceeds going to different charities), and pop-ups where people could taste and buy experimental wheels not sold in stores.

But Crown Cheese doesn’t simply toss the young cheeses in the cave and forget about them. They are true collaborators, working closely with their producer partners, experimenting with how to bring out the best flavors of each individual cheese. They experiment, taking on things like washing rinds and bandaging hard cheeses, and they also determine when a cheese is ready to leave the cave and emerge into the world . “We say, this what we're thinking as far as aging protocol, whether we’re going to bandage a cheese and have it be like a Cheddar, or we’re going to wash it in beer and have it be on the funkier side,” says Hesse. They see their role as taking something that’s good, that comes from a top-quality source and making it even better.

One of their most popular cheeses is Barnburner, a clothbound smoked cheddar-style raw milk cow’s cheese done with Grafton Village in Vermont, one of their main partners. It’s a deep, dark orange, with a delicate smoky flavor that’s bandaged and ages for four months. Windham, another bestseller, is the unsmoked version of it, and just as delicious. Carpenter’s Wheel, a pasteurized goat cheese aged for five months, is a collaboration with Firefly Farms in Maryland, while Tubby is an Alpine-style raw cow’s milk venture with Spring Brook Farm in Vermont that’s aged for more than a year. They also have several washed-rind rounds with Old Chatham Creamery in New York. Crown Jewel is one of their newer offerings, a creamy cheese made with Roelli Cheese Haus in Wisconsin, using milk from a single producer.

And while they started exclusively with American producers, they’ve since partnered with distributor Forever Cheese to age three of their European cheeses.

“We have one Italian producer, Quattro Portoni, and we do two buffalo milk cheeses, they are kind of Taleggio style, called Bufarolo,” says Hesse. “You can’t really get buffalo milk cheeses outside of Italy, and the opportunity kind of landed in our lap and the logistics were there.” Forever Cheese also connected them with Quesos Corcuera from Spain, and with them, they make Queen of Corona, a tangy goat milk cheese.

When Crown Finish takes on a new cheese, they’ll experiment with different treatments and aging before settling on the best method. In normal times, cheese makers visit the cave and work together to determine the right aging process. And when longtime partners have surplus milks, they contact Crown Finish to see what they can do with it. “Everything is very collaborative. When we work with a cheesemaker, and when we agree to take on their cheeses, they’re putting a lot of trust in us and our practices,” says Hesse. “We want it to be a product that they’re also proud of.”

Like so many other cheese producers, Crown Finish has had ups and downs since the pandemic started. And since they have to decide how much cheese to age several months, or even a year before it might be able to sell, they’ve found themselves gambling on cheese. “It was just this massive leap of faith that we were taking. But we decided to be optimistic and to not put less on our pallets coming in from our cheesemakers, because we also want to keep them in business, too,” says Hesse. “At the very least, what we can do is continue to buy cheese from our cheesemakers for as long as we can. And we’ll just figure it out from there.”

While things continue to remain unknown, they’ve begun selling their cheeses online, individually and in curated boxes like the Victory Cheese Box ($75 for three one-pound pieces of Carpenter’s Wheel, Mixed Signal, and Crown Jewel) and started a monthly cheese club. And they’re continuing to give to charities as well, with their Community Chest offering for local pickup ($55 for two one-pound cheeses of their choice, with $10 donated to a rotating charity). Plus, their cheese continues to be carried in many Whole Food Stores, as well as at independent mongers and markets around the country.