Author Topic: Cheese/meat/wine cave? Is it possible?  (Read 5838 times)

sgshoemaker09

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Cheese/meat/wine cave? Is it possible?
« on: January 05, 2014, 05:12:06 PM »
We are in the designing stage of building a house and we are talking about the basement.

I want to have cheese, wine, and meat aging rooms as well as a large pantry for my mason jars. My question to you is, assuming that the wine is bottled will storing it in the same room as the cheese still have adverse affects? What about aging the meat alongside the cheese? My plan was to insulate one room with an outside wall so that it maintains about 50F year round, which will cover most if not all of the requirements for aging cheese meat and wine.

This leads me to the second part:

How far away should the place where me make the wine be away from the cheese, and the cheese making room?

Thanks
Sarah 

John@PC

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Re: Cheese/meat/wine cave? Is it possible?
« Reply #1 on: January 08, 2014, 11:01:00 PM »
You will be one of the lucky few of us with a dedicated aging room.  I personally would never want to age beef and cheese in the same enclosure.  Dry-aging beef is, like someone said, controlled rotting  :P to a degree, so you may get some unwanted flora (i.e. bacteria) in the environment that may not be benefical to the cheese.  Also, while the humidity target is near 80 to 85% for both I think the optimum temperature for dry aging beef should be lower than what is optimum for cheese.   I've made cheese, aged beef and beer but not wine so I can't comment on that, but because the bottles are sealed I would think they would be quite happy co-habitating with your cheeses  :).  Also I remember seeing a post here of a great looking cave with a stockpile of cheese and wine (I'll look it up and post a link).

Good luck with the new house!

jwalker

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Re: Cheese/meat/wine cave? Is it possible?
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2014, 03:04:10 PM »
You will be one of the lucky few of us with a dedicated aging room.  I personally would never want to age beef and cheese in the same enclosure.  Dry-aging beef is, like someone said, controlled rotting  :P to a degree, so you may get some unwanted flora (i.e. bacteria) in the environment that may not be benefical to the cheese.  Also, while the humidity target is near 80 to 85% for both I think the optimum temperature for dry aging beef should be lower than what is optimum for cheese.   I've made cheese, aged beef and beer but not wine so I can't comment on that, but because the bottles are sealed I would think they would be quite happy co-habitating with your cheeses  :).  Also I remember seeing a post here of a great looking cave with a stockpile of cheese and wine (I'll look it up and post a link).

Good luck with the new house!

That may have been my aging room/cave.

I have no problem doing it all in one room , the temps for cheese and meat aging are roughly the same , but I have an enclosed aging chamber in the room for my natural rind cheeses , the rest are coated/waxed anyway , so contamination hasn't been a problem.

I only do cured meats once a year , usually for a month or so in the fall , but if you had racks of exposed natural rind cheeses and meat hanging all year , I would definitely want separate rooms.

Once the wine is bottled , it's not an issue , I don't ferment my wine in there tho , that's done in a separate room.

As I'm pursuing a small business in cheese , they will all have to be separate by law eventually , but right now I have to make the most of what limited space I have.




sgshoemaker09

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Re: Cheese/meat/wine cave? Is it possible?
« Reply #3 on: January 10, 2014, 04:07:21 PM »
The basement will be mostly unfinished, and we really don't need the space right now so I could use more space as I need it. I may end up looking for one of those big commercial fridges, you know the ones that you see with the pop in them all the time as myself and one of my sons are very sensitive to mold. So I would like to keep the cheese as free from it as possible.

I think we have definitely decided that the wine bottles and the pantry (stuff canned in mason jars) will be in the same area closer to the woodstove so there is no chance of them freezing in the winter. And the meat processing (which will probably also become a general food processing room in the summer will be on the north wall away from the wood stove as it won't be used during the winter anyways, that's more of a seasonal thing. The wine making room will be also closer to the wood stove as we will have wine fermenting during the winter. I believe that the cheese making will happen in a dedicated spot in my laundry room (anyone think of any problems this may cause?) upstairs near the kitchen.

All this house planning stuff is completely overwhelming.  :o

Offline Al Lewis

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Re: Cheese/meat/wine cave? Is it possible?
« Reply #4 on: January 11, 2014, 10:36:02 AM »
If you are going to do dried meat products such as salumi you have to be very careful to keep any foreign bacteria away from them.  Using Bactoferm Mold 600 will help this.
« Last Edit: November 10, 2015, 06:53:46 PM by Al Lewis »
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john H

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Re: Cheese/meat/wine cave? Is it possible?
« Reply #5 on: November 10, 2015, 02:49:51 AM »
I have recently heard the mold will attack the corks and make them disintegrate.