In The Limelight: Alemar Cheese Company
We recently spent a day visiting with our friends at the FOOD BUILDING to learn about what they do and the importance of local food production. We left feeling enlightened, inspired, and motivated. Read on to discover a little bit about the (food) magic happening right here in Northeast.
Alemar Cheese Company can boast that they have the second-best brie in the United States, according to the American Cheese Society. That’s no small feat! Founded in Mankato in 2008, Alemar made the move to Minneapolis joining the FOOD BUILDING in 2019. Hyper-locality is Alemar’s language, as they source all their milk from a small family farm in the region where the cows are grass-fed all year long (yes, even in Minnesota). Head Cheesemaker Charlotte Serino joined Alemar in 2021, and prior to joining Alemar, Serino worked on a goat farm in Pennsylvania making cheese. Alemar offers a range of cheeses including Bent River Camembert, Good Thunder, Blue Earth Brie, Saint James Tomme, Fromage Blanc, Sakatah, and newly launched, a cheese called Apricity. Apricity, which is a word that means the warmth of the sun in winter, is a slight departure from Alemar’s historical cheese personality and has a unique texture that is both crumbly and fudgy. One of the many ways that Alemar uses its hyper-local focus to its advantage, Serino explains, is that the flavor of cheese will change depending on the location where it’s made. One could use the same recipe, but if a cheese was made in two different locations, it is going to taste different and be a different experience. Serino also shared that, in cheesemaking, “the very human relationship between people and the cheese” is forever present and that flavor is influenced by the human touch.
