Cypress Grove's Latest Cheese: Big Things Come in Small Packages

Cypress Grove was an early leader in the American goat cheese movement and is celebrated for its soft-ripened, fresh, and aged cheeses. The company is best known for one of the most famous goat cheeses in America, Humboldt Fog, which has won first-place awards from the American Cheese Society and gold at the World Cheese Awards multiple times. But just shy of their 40th anniversary Cypress Grove continues to create new cheeses and takes pride that their model dairy is certified by the American Humane Association.

Humboldt Fog

Humboldt Fog considered the company’s flagship, is a soft-ripened goat cheese that has a distinctive ribbon of black ash that feathers when sliced, replicating the fog in Humboldt County. Flavors include fresh cream and buttermilk, and like other soft-ripened cheeses, and it becomes zestier with age. It’s unique for a goat cheese because of its hand-packed dry curd and penicillium candidum rind with a Morbier-like ash line just under the rind, resembling a French Brie.

Humboldt Fog launched in 1992 after the company’s founder Mary Keehn, “literally dreamt up a cheese” says Cypress Grove’s senior marketing manager Haley Nessler, borrowing from the classic traditions of French cheesemakers while adding “a generous amount of American irreverence and ingenuity.” Keehn created the recipe during her modest beginnings in Northern California, when she didn’t have enough funds for more than a few cheese forms. To do this, she allowed the wet curd to hang longer and hand-packing the resulting drier curd into forms lined with cheesecloth, and then immediately turning out the cheese to reuse the form again. It has since become the company’s most popular cheese.

Purple Haze

From its fresh cheese selection, the Purple Haze is also a fan favorite, made with lavender and hand-harvested wild fennel pollen. It’s a standard by which the company measures its other flavored disks, which are also cheekily named, such as the PsycheDillic (made with dill pollen) and the Sgt. Pepper (made with a secret combination of peppers and exotic spices). Nessler said the team likes to name products with a wink and a nudge and have fun with it.

Midnight Moon

Cypress Grove’s most popular aged cheese Midnight Moon is similar to a Gouda. Made from pasteurized goat's milk and aged for six months or more, you’ll get nuttiness and brown butter that leads to caramel. Midnight Moon along with Lamb Chopper an aged sheep’s milk cheese are actually made in Holland, thanks to a partnership forged by Keehn with a Dutch cheesemaker.

Little Giant

Never satisfied to rest on their laurels, Cypress Grove just added a new cheese to the herd: Little Giant. It’s a bloomy rinded cheese that’s buttery and smooth with slightly sweet, yeasty, fresh-bread taste and mushroom notes that deepen with age. The ooey-gooey, soft-ripened goat cheese is the result of “years-long experimentation and development,” said Nessler. It’s currently packaged and sold in small wheels. It can be served with briny olives, shortbread cookies, and wildflower honey, and it pairs well with sparkling wine and hazy IPAs. Nessler said it “has been known to mysteriously disappear in one sitting.” That may be in part because although it’s a petite 4 ounces, it’s big on flavor.

While it’s part of Cypress Grove’s soft-ripened, bloomy rind collection of goat cheese, a few things set it apart. Namely, Little Giant has different ripening cultures, higher curd moisture, and different secondary ripening cultures than Humboldt Fog, the company’s flagship cheese.

The History of Cypress Grove

The story behind Keehn’s cheesemaking dates all the way back to the '70s when she adopted a couple of goats from her neighbors. A self-proclaimed hippie and single mother of four, she had no idea or plan to start a company when she started making goat cheese at home when a friend urged her to sell some at a Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. In 2010 Keehn sold Cypress Grove to Swiss company Emmi. Acquisition has been a rite of passage for many artisanal cheese companies in California including Cowgirl Creamery, Laura Chenel and Redwood Hill, and has allowed the company to expand and secure its future.

Cypress Grove Today

Amid the company’s launch of Little Giant and continued success, Nessler said she and her team are proud of the place they have in the American specialty cheese landscape, while also growing alongside the American Cheese Society and other incredible cheesemakers. A specialty goat cheese maker that deeply cares about its people, goats, and community, she and her team consider it both a success and challenge that the company stayed firmly rooted in rural Humboldt County, California. “Our home has shaped our brand and our cheeses, and we’ve formed tremendous bonds with all of the people who work so hard to get our cheese to consumers,” said Nessler.

But staying rooted isn’t without challenges. “We’re quite remote, so contending with things like road closures and transportation limitations is a yearly occurrence,” she said. “It takes about five-and-a-half hours driving on a largely two-lane highway to get to San Francisco, the closest major city. But it’s a beautiful drive through redwood forests and wine country.”

Through thick and thin Nessler remains positive and committed to the company’s vision, “We don’t want to make cheese that other people are making,” she says. “We want to make the highest quality cheeses that set us apart from the rest.”