Hollow Beck
£9.50 / 250 g4 wks · raw cow · bloomy rind
Mushroom and warm butter under a coat of white. The creamline wins by week five — we sell it at four and let you decide.
this week’s batch[ Farmhouse creamery · raw milk · est. 2011 ]
Milk in spring. Cheese when it’s ready.
Rennet is twelve acres, forty-two Ayrshires and a sandstone cellar that holds nine degrees whether we like it or not. We make raw-milk wheels the slow way — salt them, turn them, wash them, and wait. Mostly we wait.
- The herd
- 42 Ayrshires
- Cellar humidity
- 94%
- Weeks of waiting
- 4–52
[ The cheeses ]
Six wheels, one herd.
Everything below is raw milk from our own cows, set with traditional rennet, salted by hand and aged under the byre. Weights are approximate, because knives are honest and wheels are not rectangles.
Torchbearer
£12.00 / 250 g10 wks · raw cow · washed rind
Washed in cider brine every third day until it glows. Louder in the room than on the tongue — just.
few wheels leftHaymeadow
£8.00 / 250 g6 wks · raw cow · tomme
The young one. Grass-sweet and springy, rind like a dusty footpath. Our answer to lunch.
in the shopMoth & Moon
£10.00 / 250 g5 wks · raw cow · ash-ripened
A line of oak ash under the bloom, like dusk under snow. Quietly the prettiest thing we make.
few wheels leftWhetstone
£13.50 / 250 g9 mo · raw cow · natural rind
Brushed and turned since winter. Broth, hazelnut, and the first crunch of crystals.
in the shopBell & Byre
£15.00 / 250 g14 mo · raw cow · clothbound
Bound in lard and calico, aged through two hay cuts. Deep, savoury, faintly of the cellar itself.
next wheels october[ The cave ]
Nine degrees, and patience.
Under the byre there is a sandstone cellar the temperature of a spring morning, all year round. Every wheel ages down there on oak shelves. Pick a rind, drag the weeks, and watch the cave do the part we can’t.
- Week
- wk 3
- Rind
- 1.3 mm
- Humidity
- 93.6 %
- Cellar
- 10.3 °C
Tasting — bloomy rind, week 3
The bloom has knitted shut. Raw mushroom, warm butter — a thin creamline starting at the rind.
Our affinage ledger, plotted — three rind schedules the cellar actually keeps. Drag, switch, taste along.
[ The farm ]
The cows write the recipe.
Forty-two Ayrshires graze twelve acres of old pasture — ribwort, clover, meadowsweet, a hedge full of blackthorn. In April the milk turns the colour of straw and the spring wheels carry it all summer. By November it’s paler, fattier, quieter, and so are we.
We milk once a day, in the morning, and the milk goes into the vat raw — before it has time to forget the field. Rennet, an hour, a curd knife, and then the long part starts: the cellar holds nine degrees and ninety-four percent humidity without being asked, the way sandstone has for centuries.
Every wheel is turned every third day and written into the ledger — date, shelf, weight, weather. Nothing leaves early. If a wheel needs another month, it gets another month, and your order waits with it. Nobody has ever complained twice.
— E. Marchbank, herdswoman & affineur
[ Order ]
Ask for a wheel.
We cut on Thursdays and post on Fridays, wrapped in waxed paper and yesterday’s newspaper. Tell us what you’re after and when you need it — if it isn’t ready, we’ll tell you when it will be.
Or find us on a counter
- The Rind RoomLudlow · cut counter
- Corner DairyBristol · whole wheels
- Marlow & DanesLondon E8 · cut counter
- The farm gateSaturdays 9–12 · whatever’s left