Hi everybody - I'm new here, so thought I'd introduce myself. I'm Josh, and I live about 30 minutes away from Madison WI in the southwest corner of the Driftless region.
I'm a small-scale livestock farmer who primarily raises sheep and poultry on 13 acres of hills. We also keep a dairy goat whose surplus milk caused me to get interested in cheesemaking. So far I've only worked with raw goat milk for cheesemaking. I've followed a lot of David Asher's recipes and techniques from The Art of Natural Cheesemaking (using kefir as a culture), with mixed results. I've had successes so far with chevre, a few cheddar techniques, feta, paneer, a queso fresco, and shanklish. I've got a few tommes that are aging now and seem to have worked out, but the oldest still has a few months more aging to do.
As I write this (August 2023) I'm in the final steps of finishing construction on a cheese cave space I've been building in the lower level of an outbuilding on our property. It's about 4'x10', so will hold far more cheese than I'll be able to make, but has two walls that are completely underground and another two that are massively insulated, so I think I'm going to be able to maintain cave-like temp/humidity conditions without cooling for much if not all of the year.
I'm super interested in learning more about cheese and becoming more competent.