A man made lake for the hydroelectric dam
So this is a bonus blog because so much has happen this week that I needed to break it up into parts. So this is about an awesome trip to the Beaufort France that I got to go on. The OSU college of Ag has a summer course where you spend two weeks in France (one week in Lyon, one week in Paris). Due the awesome resident director who set it up so that I could join the group for the day.
So it was a super beautiful bus ride up into the French Alps. It took about 2 1/2 hours to get to the Beaufort Cooperative. When we first got there we noticed a vending machine out side the building. Well it turns out that this vending machine gives you wedges of Beaufort Cheese! Once inside we got to talk to the head of the cooperative. He told us about the process from the farmers all the way to their stores. The cheese freak in me was so stoked at seeing this production floor. They had this great automated system, since each wheel of cheese ways 45 kilos each. They have a conveyor belt and machine that flips the cheese, and then loads it back on a rack so that it can be flipped again later. Each wheel is flipped 5 times over the next 24 hours. After 24 hours the cheese is taken to the Caves to age for a minimum of 5 months and up to one year. There are 7 cooperatives in the region that sell real Beaufort Cheese. All together they make 5,000 tons of cheese! However, even thought each of the cooperatives sells the same type of cheese, each one has a bit of a different flavor profile. To be considered Beaufort cheese there are several regulations that must be met. The first is the farmers can only use two different cow breeds (I can't remember exactly what they are), the animals must be kept in one of 3 valley. The cows can't be fed more the 25% of imported food. Most farmer grow their own food for their cows.
I asked the head of this cooperative what they do with the whey. He said that they will extract the fat and turn it into butter, concentrate the serum and make milk powder, then anything left over gets turned into methane gas. They also make their own rennet and yeast for their cheese.
We then got a tour of the aging caves. They have a robot that grabs the cheese, washes it (salt water), and returns it to the shelf! They had one of them running while we were there, and it was cool to watch. I believe that he said that their caves hold 32,000 rounds of cheese (it could be all the the cooperatives together). After the tour we went for a tasting. There we learned that the winter and the summer cheeses are completely different from each other. The summer cheese is different because the cows are in the alpine pastures, and eating a variety of food. Then in the winter they are just eating hay, and not able to graze on their own (mostly due to the snow). After the tasting we went to have lunch on one of the cow farms. Pierre and his wife were very gracious host, and they even invited me back to their house while I am staying in Lyon.
After lunch we went to the farmers cows, that were up in the alpine pastures. All of the cows have bells around their necks. I didn't actually think that the "cow bells" was actually real/used. We got to see how they are milked using a mobile milking station. It was so cool, the cows just lined up to get milked. The farmer in charge of the cows said that they follow the snow melt up in to the Alps every spring. They heard the cattle up the roads, and through the town. They stop for a couple of days at different altitudes to let the cows get acclimated.
Overall the trip was super fun! For me I really loved seeing all the cheese in the caves, and then getting to pet/see a ton of cows.
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Beaufort cheese vending machine
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