“A lot of people think that they want to work in a cheese cave,” Caroline Hesse, the head of sales at Crown Finish Caves, a cheese-aging company in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said, standing by a door marked “Employees Only.” “Then, when they realize that you’re in a tunnel that’s thirty feet underground for eight hours a day, a lot of them are, like, ‘Oh, maybe not.’ ” Hesse opened the door to let in a visitor.
Crown Finish’s cheese cave is situated below one of the old Nassau Brewery buildings, on Bergen Street. The company’s owners, Benton Brown and Susan Boyle, bought the building in 2001 and converted the four stories aboveground into art studios. Then they had an idea for what to do with the vaulted brick tunnels beneath the building, where the brewery once aged lager. Brown had been learning about affinage, or cheese aging. Affineurs buy “green” wheels of cheese from cheesemakers who don’t have the time or the space to minister to the cheeses for the months or years needed before they’re ready to be sliced into wedges and sold to consumers. “Cheeses that don’t need to cave are like ricotta, mozzarella—things that don’t have a rind on them,” Hesse said. “Everything else—Brie, blue cheese—needs to be put in a cave.” The Nassau Brewery tunnels, which hadn’t been used since the brewery closed, in 1916, and where the ambient temperature has stayed a cool fifty-five degrees for more than a century, are an affineur’s dream.
Hesse put on a red hairnet, a blue lab coat, and a pair of white plastic clogs—mandatory cavewear—and made her way down a spiral staircase. Crown Finish gets asked about the clogs, which fans spot on the company’s Instagram. “A German man sent us an e-mail saying, ‘I think they would go great with a lot of my outfits,’ ” Hesse said.
Opening a sliding door, she revealed the cave: a space the size of a decent studio apartment, with white brick walls and three banks of wooden shelves holding twenty-four thousand pounds of cheese-in-progress. A hygrometer—which measures humidity—read just below ninety per cent. The smell was more barnyard than locker room. In the back, two affineurs, Liana Kindler and Ethan Partyka, moved around, affinaging. Hesse made for a shelf of Mixed Signal, a clothbound Cheddar-style cheese from Vermont. “This went into the cave last week,” she said, pointing to a waxy orange cylinder a foot tall and two feet across. “And this went in last month,” she said, pointing to a Mixed Signal cylinder covered in green-gray mold. In a few more months, the mold would develop into a proper rind. Until then, the cylinders would be flipped regularly, to keep the moisture in the cheese from sinking to the bottom, and brushed, to maintain an even distribution of mold.
Cheese aging is a craft of active patience. You can’t age cheese remotely. Crown Finish Caves kept operations going through the pandemic. At the start, the company sold whole wheels direct to consumers for the first time. “Everyone was hunkering down,” Hesse said, looking over a row of Carpenter’s Wheel, a goat’s-milk cheese from Maryland, which had been molded into smooth disks intended to look like river stones. “We made videos explaining how to store a whole wheel of cheese.” At the back of the cave, globes of Mimolette, an orangey French cheese, hung from the ceiling. “We like to keep a couple wheels of Mimolette, because there’s this great mold that grows on them—these nice red spots,” Hesse said. “The air has all these molds and microbes and things that pass over all the cheeses.”
Hesse stopped to talk with Kindler, one of the affineurs. “Time kind of stands still in here,” Kindler said. “I don’t know if the sun is up right now. It could be snowing. We’re able to monitor time in a way that humans usually don’t.” Hesse nodded. “This is, like, a very normal clock,” she said, meaning the cave. “At the one-month mark, the Mixed Signals are going to start showing a lot of mold on them. At the three-week mark, the Bufarolos are going to start turning orange.”
Partyka, the other affineur, appeared. He had two flying birds tattooed on his neck. “The weirdest thing was being considered essential workers,” he said. “The world was thrown into chaos, and I’m still biking to work, coming underground, and here’s the cheese.” In the cave, social distancing was difficult. Flipping cheese, scrubbing cheese—these were normally two-person jobs.
There was the cave, and there was the world, but the line between the two had been blurred. “A lot of what we’re doing from a food-safety perspective is risk assessment,” Partyka said. “Cheese—everything—has a potential risk.”
“For every risk, there’s a protocol,” Hesse said. “Now we have these protocols for our own personal lives, too.” ♦
