The Cheesemaker of Pine Plains

Rory Chase was living a new life in California when he first learned how to make farmstead cheese. At the time, it was a hobby, something he had always been curious about, a skill he wanted to learn for its own sake. He had no plans to return to the family farm in Pine Plains.

​​He had loved growing up on Chaseholm Farm. His grandfather Ken Chase — an oral surgeon in Pine Plains who wore silk suits and fancied himself a gentleman farmer — had bought three small plots in the 1930s to create Chaseholm. Rory never met him. The farm, instead, was defined by his father, Barry, a hard-working dairyman who took over in 1971. “Both my parents still live on the farm,” Chase said.

With his younger sister, Sarah, and older brother, Farley, Rory spent childhood summers at county fairs and agricultural shows. “It was like camp for us,” he recalled. “We loved growing up here.” But affection ran alongside austerity. High-interest bank debt and low commodity milk prices made dairying a precarious way to live. “It was a struggle,” Chase said. “Pinching the penny, fixing things yourself, feeling kind of bootstrappy, and watching farms around us collapse.”

After graduating from Tufts University in 2000 with a degree in English and film, Chase returned to the farm for a season. The work was demanding and physical, and he relished it. “I was young and strong and healthy, being the go-to person for those types of chores,” he said. Still, the lesson his father tried to impart was blunt: “Don’t do dairy farming.”

So Chase went west, settling in San Francisco and finding work in the film industry. In 2002, almost on a whim, he enrolled in a farmstead cheesemaking class run by UC Davis in Cambria, near San Luis Obispo. By 2007, he was also working in the then-nascent medical marijuana industry and had developed property in California. His life felt full, busy, and far from Pine Plains.

Then came the phone call.

His dad, Barry, worn down after 36 years of running the farm and already having had both knees replaced from years of hard work, was ready to sell. “Northern Dutchess losing its last dairy farm,” read an April 2007 headline in The Daily Freeman. Rory, who had always imagined retiring on the land someday, suddenly realized there might be nothing left to come home to. “My dad was like, ‘Are you interested in coming back? You can do what you want here.’”

Chase recalled telling his father, “I am, but I don’t want to do it exactly like you did.” Commodity dairying, bound to volatile milk prices, had nearly broken the farm. Chase wanted to create a value-added product, something that could command its own worth. Cheese, he thought, might be the answer.

His siblings shared the desire to see Chaseholm endure, though none were yet sure what role they would play. Barry sold his herd to an Amish farm in Pennsylvania and rented the land to a former herdsman with his own cows, buying time for the next generation to chart a path forward.

Friends at Ronnybrook Farm Dairy in Ancramdale gave Rory space to experiment. “I was up there at midnight, making cheese,” he said. “It was cool. They let it happen.” 

He sold his California property and poured the capital into the venture, taking classes at an artisanal cheesemaking institute hosted by the University of Vermont: “They would bring the world’s best cheesemakers to teach. Like, here’s how we make cheddar in Somerset, England, where my family’s been making cheese for 500 years.” Soon, he was selling at farmers markets.

By 2009, Chase had taken over a small, aging barn his grandfather built in the 1940s — the same barn that still houses the creamery today. For five or six years, he lived largely off his California savings, unable to pay himself. In 2010, his sister joined him after graduating from college, and together they began exploring more sustainable farm practices. Sarah took over farm operations in 2013, transforming the dairy into a certified organic operation and adding pigs and 100% grass-fed beef cattle, now a significant revenue stream. Farley, the eldest sibling, is a literary agent in New York City and keeps a small residence on the farm.

The creamery operates as a separate business, a structure Chase finds essential. “That’s very useful for two siblings who work closely together,” he said. “We are each able to have our own domain, our own autonomy. You might say that good fences make good siblings.” Today, the creamery employs 14 people, eight of them full-time — no small thing in rural Dutchess County.

Shimmying the Bins 

Chaseholm Farm Creamery produces several cheeses, all made from pasteurized whole milk. Raw milk from Chaseholm and Ronnybrook is pasteurized in a small, low-tech vat system, heated to 145 degrees for 30 minutes before cooling to 90 degrees. Heavy cream, used in some of the cheeses, arrives from Hudson Valley Fresh, a cooperative of local dairy farmers, while yogurt for Chaseholm is made at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent. Though Chaseholm Farm sells raw milk directly at its farmstand, the creamery no longer produces raw milk cheeses. The long aging periods and what Chase calls “onerous regulatory oversight” proved too burdensome.

Each cheese follows its own choreography. “A cascade of different organisms working in concert” is how Chase described it. To make Camembert, pasteurized whole milk is cooled to 90 degrees and inoculated with souring cultures. “They consume the milk sugar and produce lactic acid,” Chase explained. The cultures replicate every 18 minutes. After about an hour, the liquid is pumped into coagulating bins and vegetarian rennet is added, allowing proteins to set.

The resulting coagulum is cut with a hand-held metal grid — known as a harp — into tiny squares (curds), releasing whey. Every few minutes, a creamery worker gently wiggles the bin. “We cut them delicately, and shimmy those coagulating bins, until it shrinks down by almost half,” Chase said. “We’re separating the curds and whey.”

The curds are then hooped — that is, packed into cylindrical molds. “Each mold holds about 30 cheeses, each weighing less than a half a pound,” Chase explained. “We’ll flip those trays and their block molds several times through the evening, maintaining an ambient temperature of 72 degrees.”

The next day, the cheeses are brined, dried, and moved into a high-humidity aging room — 99 percent humidity, 52 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’ll smell like bread leavening, very yeasty,” Chase said. By the eighth or ninth day, the first white hairs of Penicillium candidum appear. “We’ll flip them around six times over two weeks in that room.” After about two weeks, the cheeses are chilled, wrapped, and stored for another two to four weeks. By the time they reach the shelf, they are about a month old. “I prefer them at around eight to 10 weeks,” Chase said. 

The cheeses

The creamery currently produces one fresh farmer’s cheese, similar to fromage blanc, offered plain or with herbs; four aged soft cheeses; and two firmer aged cheeses. Alongside its Camembert is Nimbus, a triple-cream soft-ripened cheese aged in the creamery’s cave. “It’s probably our most popular cheese, super rich and decadent, a beautiful cheese,” Chase said. In 2021, Food & Wine named Chaseholm one of the 50 best cheesemakers in the United States, singling out Nimbus as “a chunky little wheel of buttery, bloomy rind beauty.”

Moonlight, a Chaource-style cheese, begins with a tart, firm center that sweetens as it ripens from the outside in. Red Beard, a soft-ripened cheese washed with hard cider, is described by Chase as “this little stinker,” its sweetness balanced by what he calls “earth funk.” The cheese traces its lineage to monastic traditions in Northern Europe. “When it’s young, it’s got a bright citrusy tart flavor, but as it ages, it becomes sweeter and milder.”

The two firm cheeses include Stella Vallis Tomme, aged four to six months, with a nutty profile and a cheddary edge, and Alpage, an Alpine-style cheese aged six to eight months, its darker pâte rich with nut, caramel, and umami notes.

A new era on the horizon

When Chase returned home, his goal was to free Chaseholm from the constraints of commodity agriculture. He and Sarah have pursued that vision relentlessly. One key shift has been moving away from wholesale distribution toward direct-to-consumer sales. “We go to as many as a dozen farmers markets a week,” Chase said. “Every sale direct to a consumer might be the equivalent of three sales to a distributor.”

This spring, the creamery will enter a new phase. Funded by two major grants, Chaseholm is adding a 3,000-square-foot addition to the barn to house new equipment, including a raw milk receiving room and a production space with a tilting vat system feeding automated sluices. “There will be a pneumatic turning station that can flip 15 block molds at a time — that’s a lot less lifting on the manual side, which is literally lifting tons every day.”

The upgrades could increase production by as much as 120%, though Chase is in no rush. “We might have half as many production days a week, so we can start relaxing,” he said. The changes will also reduce labor costs and, notably, convert the creamery’s tiny office into an employee lounge — an indoor place to eat lunch, rather than in a car. After 18 months of regulatory approvals and setbacks from new federal tariffs on largely German equipment, Chase expects the system to be operational this spring. “If it takes until June, I’m gonna be heartbroken,” he joked.

There is profit now, though not yet enough for Chase to repay his original investment. He doubts the farm would have survived without the 300-plus acres inherited from his parents. “I think we’re barely just making it work, and it’s taken a long time,” he said. “But you know, it’s a lifestyle choice. It’s a labor of love.”