In Berkshire hills, famous cheese maker fights recall fallout

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. --The sun still hasn't risen over the Berkshire hills when Michael Miller's pickup pulls in front of a building on the Maple Shade Farm in Sheffield.

The dense smell of cow manure laces the December air, but Miller, a former newspaper publisher turned cheese maker, isn't bothered by the stench or the cold. He's 63, and curses after slipping on a patch of ice as he enters the building.

Inside, a cylindrical silver tank is being filled with the milk of 15 Jersey cows standing on the other side of the small room.

Miller works quickly and quietly; sterilizing and adjusting hoses and pumps until he has a clean, tight connection between the tank and a smaller container secured to the back of his pickup.

In just a few minutes, he's siphoned off 200 gallons of raw milk, the key ingredient he says makes his Berkshire Blue cheese so remarkable.

"You taste the cow in there," he says. "I want you to taste the barnyard."

Berkshire Blue has won medals from the World Cheese Awards and the American Cheese Society. It has been featured at feasts showcasing the culinary arts, like the International Slow Foods Festival in Italy, the James Beard Dinner in New York City and Boston's Spinazzola Dinner.

But those honors are tainted by controversy. In March, testers from the federal Food and Drug Administration found traces of listeria in Berkshire Blue, prompting Miller to recall 13 wheels of his cheese and discard more that he had in stock.

He says the amount of bacteria was so minute it wouldn't do any harm, and believes he was the target of an agency intent on banning all food made with unpasteurized milk -- an assault, he says, on Americans' taste buds.

"If this were Paris," he says, "I'd have a line of French chefs out the door. Here, I have the FDA."

When Miller arrives at his production facility in Great Barrington a few minutes before 7 a.m., the only person waiting by his door is David Boag, his 38-year-old assistant.

Together, they pump the milk into three stainless steel vats that have been sterilized with a cleaning solution that leaves the place smelling like a hospital.

The work room is small and illuminated by the dull glow of fluorescent lights. Miller and Boag are dressed in the uniforms of English cheese makers -- long lab coats, cloth caps and rubber boots, all white.

What happens next is as much a waiting game as it is a craft.

The milk is heated and curdled with the help of two blue molds. After three hours, Miller and Boag slice the curd into chunks the size of candy bars. The remaining liquid, called whey, splashes to the floor as it's drained off.

The mushy bits of curd are packed into round forms that shape the cheese into wheels. In the following days, the hardened wheels are soaked in brine and poked with dozens of holes. The small tunnels allow veins of mold to spider through the wheel, leaving streaks and specks of blueish-green.

The wheels are stored in another room at a constant 55 degrees. For the next 60 days, they sit on wooden planks covered with varying degrees of furry gray mold. The smell of ammonia -- a gas produced as cheese ripens -- is overwhelming.

By the time it finds its way to stores across the country, Miller's cheese commands up to $20 a pound.

"There are outstanding blue cheese makers in America, and Berkshire Blue is one of them," said Jeff Roberts, who represented the delegation of American cheese makers at the 2001 Slow Foods Festival in Italy, which featured Miller's cheese. "It's really creamy and very flavorful. Michael has helped define American blue cheese."

Miller is banking on that sort of praise as he tries to boost sales after the listeria contamination cost him about $31,000, an episode he says was blown out of proportion by the FDA.

"They bought a bunch of my cheese, ground it up and incubated the snot out of it," Miller said. "They mixed it with a growth hormone that wouldn't occur in nature, and they found listeria."

Miller says he traced the bacteria -- which can cause fever and diarrhea but poses greater health risks to pregnant women and those who are already sick -- to the hay the cows were eating.

While pasteurization would've killed the listeria, Miller isn't about to sacrifice the flavor that comes from raw milk.

Officials from the FDA did not return repeated calls to The Associated Press. But dietary guidelines issued last year by the federal departments of agriculture and health and human services say raw milk products should be avoided.

"If you're on a farm, feces and other things have a risk of getting into the milk and causing contamination," said Fergus Clydesdale, head of the food sciences department at the University of Massachusetts and a member of the government's 2005 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. "That's why pasteurization was invented -- to get rid of harmful bacteria."

Miller says he now tests every batch of cheese for bacteria like listeria and E. coli. He hasn't found any problems since his recall, but some say his reputation may never recover.

"One of two things happen after something like this," said Ihsan Gurdal, owner of Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge. "It's a huge uphill road, or you give up."

Gurdal says he stopped selling Berkshire Blue a few years ago because the cheese was inconsistent, coming in either too dry or too creamy.

Miller says the variations are caused by seasonal diet changes of the Jersey cows, not by changes in his recipe.

Still, after Berkshire Blue's bout with listeria, Gurdal said he won't even try it again.

Miller's operation is more of a hobby-turned-business than a necessary livelihood, and he seems prepared to wait out the tough times. In an average year, Miller earns about $60,000 from making cheese.

"Cheese paid for a couple of good vacations last year," he says, adding that "everyone in the cheese business made their money doing something else."

For Miller, that something else was running the Berkshire Eagle, a daily newspaper that was in his family since his grandfather started publishing it in the 1800s. Some admittedly bad business decisions and tough economic times forced Miller to sell the paper in 1995, pushing him into an early retirement.

"Rather than sit around and become a complete drunk," he said, "I started making cheese."

He always enjoyed blue cheese, but never thought much about it until a dinner party he attended ended with a cheese course. After tasting a blue cheese with a glass of port and a plate of walnuts and raisins, the one-time publisher knew what he wanted to do next.

His curiosity led him to England, where he met Alan Duffield. Duffield had been making blue cheese with a recipe he developed himself, and taught Miller how to replicate it in 1997.

"You have to have a feeling for cheese making with your hands, not in your head," Duffield says from his home in Somerset, England. "Michael has that feel."

The night before his early morning wake-up to start making cheese, Miller is relaxing in his home -- an enormous house built in the 1920s on top of Pittsfield's South Mountain. Miller pokes at the ice cubes in a glass of scotch as he discusses his plans to produce a gourmet blue cheese salad dressing and maybe a cheddar cheese.

Whether those things take off, and whether sales of Berkshire Blue make a full comeback from the listeria incident, Miller doesn't seem too worried. After all, cheese isn't paying his bills.