How much do you love cheese? Enough to be its full-time babysitter? Yes, that's a real job and in France, the person who does it is called an affineur. Their job is to "guide the cheese from birth to maturity," kind of like parenting but with fewer therapy sessions. Or maybe not.
So what does an affineur actually do? We asked Olivia Haver, an East Coast affineur who recently won the 2025 Daphne Zepos Research Award. She'll be using her grant money to study aging cellars around the US with the goal of developing a how-to guide for future affineurs.
Evan Kleiman: Why don't you start by telling us what affinage actually entails. What do you do on a day to day basis?
Olivia Haver: Yes, on a very basic level, it's the maturation of cheese, so taking cheese from its newly fresh state that we call green cheese, and maturing it in a cave environment, which is where you grow the rind, where flavors start to develop. What we're doing during the day is really, like you said, we're babysitting the cheese. We're listening to it, we're smelling it, we're feeling it because cheese will always tell you what it wants, you just need to know exactly what to do. That could look like turning the cheese over and making sure that the rind is evenly developing on both sides. That could be brushing the cheese if you want to knock down some of that rind or sometimes washing the cheese, where you apply a brine solution to the outside to try to get a more funky, pungent rind.
What would happen if you did nothing? What would happen if there was no affineur babysitting the cheese?
I've seen it happen. But what would happen is if you just took your cheese, put it in the cellar or away, and never took care of it again, all of the moisture in the cheese would end up slumping to the bottom, and you would get a misshapen cheese. Your rind wouldn't form properly on the bottom part because you're not getting air flow there, it's not interacting with the environment around it. And you would end up with uneven textures, off flavors and something very wild but maybe not in the best way when we think about having a wild, unusual cheese.
Where are you based and where do you work? Do you work for a specific company?
Yes, I am based in Waitsfield, Vermont. I work for von Trapp Farmstead. We are a small organic farmstead operation, meaning our cows live on the same land where we make the cheese and also where we mature the cheese in our caves. I've been in Vermont off and on for the last 10 years, and it is, to me, one of the most beautiful places.
Is there such a thing as a freelance affineur?
I can't think of any off the top of my head. In the US, we don't have a lot of affineurs, in general, like a career solely doing affinage, and that has to do with the US. We don't have the same type of knowledge that exists in Europe with thousands of years of creating cheese. Also, our pricing structure is a little bit different than in Europe, where they have subsidies for farmers, so the cost of creating cheese isn't as high in the US. If we were to have separate affinage, I know I'm veering off a little bit, you'd be buying cheese at a premium from the cheesemaker. Then, you'd need to mature it, and then, their price would be even higher before selling it to the general public. So in the United States, what we typically see are farmstead cheese makers, like where I work, who are doing the affinage. It's usually all in-house.
How did you initially get into this very specific line of work? Did you start working with cheese in a different way, and you were just drawn to this part of the process?
I was working in a small cheese shop in Red Bank, New Jersey. It was called the Cheese Cave. It is no longer open. That's where I learned about how wonderful cheese is, how it's storytelling, how you're connecting with people. It's also a bit of science. And every time you give someone a piece of cheese, their face totally lights up. I still get excited about cheese every single day. So I knew that was something I wanted to be a part of making.
I think from looking at the few pictures that were available online or in books, I knew I wanted to be a part of that maturation process without ever having worked in cheese production, which led me to apply for a position at Jasper Hill Farm, which has seven different caves that are dedicated to maturing cheese. I thought this is the perfect place to go. Sure enough, within my first day, I think I fell in love with maturing cheese.
Olivia Haver brushes the rind of one of the cheeses in her care. Photo courtesy of Olivia Haver.
Do you get to have a more regular set of hours? I know cheesemaking, like breadmaking on a large scale level, can be punitive in that the milk comes every day, and every day you have to deal with the milk. It's very hard to take time off.
Yes, the cows need to be milked every single day, and cheese never sleeps. It is always alive. It's always growing a rind or there's protein and fat breaking down, which means that we need to care for it every day. So where the cheese makers, they have a little bit more of a strict schedule, because the milk is ready to go, it now needs to be transformed into cheese. Once you start that cheesemaking process, you have to stay on the clock and you're watching how the milk is reacting to the cultures and how your rennet is working. So you have this timeline you need to follow but you're also responding to these raw ingredients
With affinage, it's more "I know I need to get these things done today, this week, and sometimes even this month," so working that in with other things that need to be done. When you're in a small farmstead operation like I am, we're all doing a little bit of everything. Sometimes you don't know what you're going to find when you go into work that day. I might think a cheese could be ready sometime this week and then all of a sudden, the rind is looking perfect, the flavors are completely blooming, and it's like, all right, it's time, let's go.
How do you taste a cheese that is going to go out into the retail world? Is there a tool that lets you explore the inside without any noticeable damage to the rind?
Yes. For hard cheeses, one of the most common tools is called a trier, and it allows us to take a core sample and we pull that out. We still end up with a little bit of a circle in the rind but when you take that core sample, you can see how the texture is changing from the outside to the inside of the cheese because most cheeses, they break down from the outside in. You'll see differences in flavor, in appearance. There might be a little bit of a color variation, there might be a little bit of a texture variation, so we'll be able to get in there, taste it, and then put that plug back in.
With soft cheeses, you're pretty much breaking into that cheese and there isn't a way to come back from how you've changed the shape. But when we're tasting, we are thinking, how are these flavors different in different parts of the cheese? Is this cheese on track? Is this something that I find exciting and desirable? And which one of our customers would really love this batch of cheese?
Where is cheese aged? You've mentioned the word caves, but I would imagine in the US, there aren't a lot of caves. So what do you do? How is the environment created?
Yes, in the US, we have man-made caves, for the most part. In Europe, you'll find more of those natural caves with stalactites, stalagmites. Sometimes they finish the floors, sometimes they don't. I've even seen pictures of a man spelunking into a cave with his cheeses hanging. He's hanging, cheeses are hanging. But in the US, we usually have spaces that can look anything like, sometimes they look like closets and there's a lot of concrete. There's something called "dairy board" that's very easy to clean. You can also use bricks.
In the US, we're very much looking at, what are the resources available to us? What does the space look like that I purchased this farm? And we kind of work around that. But what we're able to do is if we're not in a place to choose the materials of our cave, we can still have the control of humidity, temperature, and air flow, and those are all the factors that are going to influence the environment around the cheese to give us the desired rinds.
There are so many terms that people hear about cheese but we don't always know what they mean. For example, a washed rind cheese, I assume is literal. It means that you wash the cheese. But what does that do? How does that give you the end result?
You totally nailed it. A washed rind and cheese is when we are looking for a rind that's going to be more bacterial-driven, so something that's going to be funkier, a little tackier. What we're doing is applying a brine solution to the outside of the rind and you could do that by using your hands, using a brush. Some people, depending on what you're looking for, will go and dunk their cheese.
The brine can also be made of different things. You can do something as simple as salt and water, not so much salt that it gets in the way of brine development. Or you could also wash in beer. That's traditionally how monks would wash their cheese. Or you could use spirits or wine. When you are washing with these different types of brines, you're not so much thinking about, "how do I flavor this cheese with beer or wine?" you're selecting for different microbes on the outside that will give you a different rind experience.
"Cheese never sleeps. It is always alive," says affineur Olivia Haver. Photo courtesy of Olivia Haver.
Talk to me about mold a little bit. People hear "mold," they immediately think it's a bad thing. Please explain why in the cheese world, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Mold, in the case of cheese, is a great thing, and most cheese has some kind of mold involved in it. When you're making cheese, you mix cultures into your milk. Cultures consist of yeast, mold, and bacteria that are going to influence how your rind looks, what the texture of your cheese is going to be like, how it's going to smell. Mold is also helping to break down the cheese and give us those beautiful textures we're looking for.
If you just were to make cheese and eat it right away without a rind, it's usually kind of spongy, very low flavor, very mild. To get to that place where, for example, you have a luscious Brie, the paste oozing out the sides, that's in part from the mold on the outside that's growing. It's all mold that we've generally selected, in that case, something like Penicillium candidum. But there's also flora in the air. We say this is where our terroir comes from. It's from our milk. It's also from what's floating around.
It is totally okay to try the rind, that's one of the most common questions. As long as it's not made up of cloth, bark, or wax, rind is always fair game. It usually represents hard work that someone has put into it. It represents the place that the cheese came from. You could almost always smell the cave when you open up a wheel of cheese, and that's from the rind.
How does pasteurization, or the lack thereof, come into play during the cheese aging process? I know people now are more curious about raw milk. Can you speak a little bit about the character of cheese made with pasteurized versus raw milk, and what the levels of risk are for consuming raw milk cheeses?
Absolutely. In the US, we have something called the 60-Day Rule. That means that if you're going to make a raw milk cheese, you must mature it for at least 60 days in your facility. In the case of soft cheeses, they mature pretty quickly. If you think about something like a smaller Brie or a smaller washed rind, those are usually in your cave for 10 days to maybe two weeks, and then the cheese is raising its hand. "I need to go out now." So it's a challenge to make those cheeses raw milk.
The 60-Day Rule came from testing cheddar cheeses and looking at when certain pathogens were not likely to grow anymore. They said, all right, after 60 days, we're in the clear. However, cheddar is not the best model to do that because cheddar is a low moisture cheese where pathogens don't want to live. It's also a little bit more acidic, so it's also not a great environment. This rule was based on one style of cheese and was not considering other styles of cheese. So the 60-Day Rule at this point does not make sense for most artisan cheese.
In the case of soft cheeses, I know in France, they won't sell Camembert after a certain point, because to them, they think it's becoming riskier as it's getting older, and that soft cheeses should be sold sooner when they're raw. So the safety thing is interesting.
With pasteurization, what you're doing is taking milk and you are killing off pathogens using time and temperature. Anytime after your milk is pasteurized, there is still space for exposure to pathogens. That's why food safety is so important with cheese, because cheese does not get heated again. It has been found that pasteurized cheeses are more likely to have a pathogen outbreak than raw milk cheeses but there are plenty of great reasons to pasteurize.
If you are not making your own milk, if you're buying milk from someone else and you want to control it, that sounds great. Pasteurization gives you more control over the flavor of your cheese. You don't have that native flora coming from the milk. And even if it's not a pathogen, it could maybe be a spoilage bacteria, something that's going to give you off flavors. Neither one is necessarily better than the other but they are very different, and the risks are not as easily clear cut. It's not like pasteurization is going to be more safe or raw milk is going to be more safe. It has to do with who you're buying the cheese from, and are they open to talking to you about food safety and what their process looks like?
Is there a cheese that is particularly interesting to age? Something where affinage really makes a huge difference and that you really love doing the entire process?
Every single cheese that you come in contact with has had some level of affinage. I, personally, I love washed rind cheeses, as you can tell. We've talked about it several times during this interview. They are so unpredictable. They can taste like mangoes. I had a cheese cheese, oma, just yesterday. One of the batches tasted and smelled like mangoes but then also had this incredible umami background and also had roasted vegetables.
Washed rinds, even when you think you have it down pat, they throw you for a curve ball. I find that it's an exciting cheese to work with. Also, sometimes the aromas are stronger than the flavors. So when we talk about stinky cheeses, I've heard folks say, "Oh, my gosh, I don't like stinky cheeses." But sometimes the bark is stronger than the bite, and you might end up with something that tastes like sourdough bread or is just a little bit buttery. It's just a wonderful, wonderful style to work with.
I'm curious about what goes on in a more industrial, large cheese setting. Are robots used to turn cheeses?
Sometimes there are robots. Robots can exist. They typically are in a larger setting, because you would need so much cheese that it is going to save your employees physically from doing the work and also making sure that it's efficient. Caring for cheese is time consuming. There's the passage of time in terms of days, weeks, and months, but there's also brushing every single wheel, picking up every single wheel. That takes a lot of time. So a robot would only come into play if it's something that's going to benefit you. But there's robots out there that can pick up a wheel of cheddar, turn it over, brush it off. They can take big wheels of alpine-style cheeses and do that whole washing process. They're loaded up with brine, and they're very impressive, and they're very cool. I love watching them.