Firstly lets debunk three broadly-held myths: Keeping the Billy Goat with your female goats is NOT the reason some goats’ cheeses taste ‘goatier’ than others, Goats are historic to the UK and have been here for over 5,000 years, Goats’ milk has pretty much the same amount of lactose in it as sheep’s and cows’ milk and is definitely not lactose free. Goats are pretty much the first animal that was ever domesticated (about 9,000 years ago in what is now Iran), and the first cheeses to be made were from their milk (cheese from goats’ milk has been found in Egypt from as far back as 5,000 years ago) – in fact there was even some in Tutankhamun’s tomb. To this day goats are often the primary source of milk and cheese in rural communities throughout the world. India is the biggest goats’ cheese making country by volume in the world, and pretty much all domesticated breeds of goat originate from the Middle East. Goats are useful as they can survive in all types of conditions with minimal food (think of them of grazing on arid mountain sides in the Middle East – indeed some goat breeds can survive…

In order to keep staff entertained during the Coronavirus pandemic, The Courtyard Dairy found some old ‘rejected’ cheeses (flavour profile was not good at all!) and challenged the staff to carve them in the best possible way. Here are their entries to The Courtyard Dairy cheese carving: Please vote for your favourite!  Drop us an email at [email protected] Find out more fascinating facts about cheese – simply sign up to The Courtyard Dairy monthly newsletter for regular  exciting offers and interesting info. from the cheese-world.  Sign up here.

When you buy farmhouse cheese you are supporting the farmer and his/her family. Shown below are just a few of the families and individuals you have supported and are continuing to support. Over the last three months, by simply buying farmhouse cheese online YOU have enabled our family business and many farmhouse cheese-makers to keep going. Without your orders and your support, our business and many others simply would not have survived, some fabulous artisan cheeses would sadly have been lost forever and many team friends would have lost their jobs. So this is a sincere THANK YOU from Andy & Kathy and the team, and from farmhouse cheese-makers across the land. Look though the pictures below to see a few showing their heartfelt appreciation of your essential support! But don’t forget, farmhouse cheese still needs ongoing support; please don’t give up ordering now we are moving out of lockdown – please keep on buying great cheese, either via your local shop or here online.  Click here to buy now >

Cheese shop The Courtyard Dairy near Settle has teamed up with the charity ‘Send a Cow’ to celebrate ‘Februdairy’. For every new three-month subscription to The Courtyard Dairy’s popular monthly cheese club taken out in February and March, The Courtyard Dairy will donate £10 to international development charity, Send a Cow; which helps feed African communities by providing them with dairy cows and the resources to farm their own food. Andy Swinscoe of The Courtyard Dairy is thrilled with the partnership “It’s great we can promote all that is brilliant about farm-made sustainable cheese, whilst at the same time raising funds for a charity which makes a positive difference to families in Africa.” The scheme was set up to celebrate ‘Februdairy’, which was created in 2018 to promote the brilliance of the British dairy industry and milk in general. “We are surrounded by many small family farmers in our community,” said Andy, “And we wanted to find a way to support them and show how good their cheese and milk is. The farmers we work with take their sustainability, environmental and ethical considerations very seriously: by using techniques such as mob-grazing, replanting herbal leys and using traditional breeds, these dairy…

Farmer and cheese-makers, Tom and Clare Noblet make Fellstone cheese on their farm near Kirkby Lonsdale in Cumbria. Andy interviewed them to find out what makes these fantastic cheese-makers tick. Give a brief synopsis of your business and career. We started making cheese at Whin Yeats in 2015, after being at the farm for about 4 years. Prior to that, Tom had worked on various farms in the Garstang area as well as working for a company that fits and maintains milking parlours. Clare had worked as a nurse, initially in cardiac intensive care and then as a community nurse. Tom came to work for Max and Jenny Burrow at Whin Yeats with a view to share farming with them, allowing the farm to continue as a dairy farm. We milk around 80 pedigree Holstein Friesian cows, all of which are bred on the farm and lamb 130 Rough Fell ewes. The main proportion of our milk is sold to First Milk on a liquid contract with, at present, about 10% being used for cheesemaking, making around 180kg of Fellstone cheese per week. We make a Dales type cheese, based on a traditional Wensleydale recipe, which is matured for 6-8…

There are many opinions and different views on what makes a true Single or Double Gloucester and how they vary as cheeses. The height, the weight, the richness, the age, the colour, the skim of the milk, using two milkings instead of just one, and adding extra cream – all have been cited at various stages in Britain’s cheese-history to explain what makes the difference between the two styles. But it seems no-one can fully agree, because even the earliest written records of the Gloucester cheeses seem to show much confusion and contradictions on what truly represents the difference. What is sure, however, is that both styles originate from the Vale of Berkeley in Gloucestershire (they were sometimes called Berkeley cheese), and originally they were made with milk from the Old Gloucester cow. Records show Gloucester cheese being made as early as the 1500s, but there is little doubt that Gloucester cheese was being made there well before that time. One of the reasons for the lack of definite evidence on the difference between these cheeses is that it appears that Single Gloucester was often reserved for the farm workers and labourers in the region, so little was written about…

Listed below are all the cheeses normally available from The Courtyard Dairy cheese shop.  Other ‘guest’ cheeses are occasionally available that may not appear online – please phone Andy on 01729 892 902 to find out what’s tasting great right now!

Well, if you thought it was salt, you’d be wrong! We do know what causes the crystalline white deposits found within hard cheeses. It isn’t common salt, and in fact you could say that what the crystals are really made of is not too exciting, but it is of interest to those who have an enquiring mind! The majority of what we find nowadays as crystals in hard cheese is amino acids (most commonly Tyrosine and sometimes Leucine) that have come about from protein breakdown. Protein is naturally found in the milk (and, therefore, the cheese). This protein is slowly broken down as the cheese ages, and in some cases it breaks down to form the aforementioned specific amino acids, Tyrosine and Leucine. Believe it or not, these amino acids move about slowly within the paste of cheese and when enough of them bump into each other, which happens occasionally, and only occasionally, they will join together. This causes a tiny crystal to start (the ‘nucleation site’) and slowly more amino acids join in, so the crystal grows. Although not contributing to flavour these amino acids do contribute to texture, giving hard cheeses a pleasant ‘crunch’. The reason they are…

The farm began 2017 under a substantial cloud of bovine Tuberculosis (bTB). Unfortunately we had a quite terrible test result just before Christmas 2016 and were counting down the days until the next test, which was due in March. The January to March period is always a quite depressing time of year in these parts anyway – everyone withdraws into their own worlds and you don’t see so much of the neighbours as farm work moves indoors and everyone gets on with their own bleak winter grind. Having said that, I really enjoy the farm in winter, intoning Winterreise to myself and reading Hamsun and Laxness in the long, cold evenings. What such grief wallowing says about me I don’t quite know. So, it was a slow wait for the next test, but well worth the wait because we were completely taken by surprise when we received a CLEAR test! No animals condemned to slaughter! It was a huge relief for us, following the loss of 17 animals – mostly in-calf heifers – since May 2016. Then began the extremely slow wait for the next test in May, which would be our ‘clearing’ test. Pass that one and we’d be…