Grumpy Farmer Goats Cheese is a soft creamy cheese made at Handley using the milk from our own goats. We’ve been making it since 2016 and it’s won awards.
Sue talks about how it got started…
“Some years ago I got chatting to a woman from Hazelwood who had a herd of Jersey cows. She’d been making cheese with her mum since she was five. She knew all the traditional farming methods, all organic. She invited me up to the farm so I went along and helped her, which she appreciated because she was in her eighties then. I loved it and I decided I wanted to do it.
We started out with three goats – Lenny, Lottie and Lockie (grandma, mother and daughter). We didn’t have the dairy then, we hand milked on a wooden stand. Then we heard from a woman in the Derbyshire Goat Society about some goats for sale in Hull and we ended up buying ten in kid. We had some neighbours who kept goats who helped us with those first ones and I just learnt from there.
A year into it, Nolwenn came to Handley as a volunteer and completely fell for the goats. She ended up staying eight years and we developed the cheese making together. We started out making a hard cheese but then moved to a soft cheese, which is what I really wanted to make. That’s what we make now.
Goats milk isn’t as stable as sheep or cows. You have to handle it carefully, pour it slowly and make sure it doesn’t get too hot, otherwise it just goes. That took me a while to get used to. As we make a soft cheese, we have to pasteurise it otherwise it can be dangerous. We pasteurise it, inoculate it, leave it 24-48 hours and check that it reaches a certain ph, then you know it’s killed anything nasty.
We won some awards in those early years too. We won bronze in the World Cheese Awards and gold and silver at the Artisan Cheese Awards in Melton Mowbray.
We were selling to the Chatsworth farm shop and decided we wanted to go to market, so we got a stall in Wirksworth. We are there every week, rain or shine. It takes time to build up customers, you can’t just arrive and think you’re going to be an instant success. People need to get to know you, to build trust. We’ve got loyal customers now who come to the market in terrible weather because they know we’ll be there and they want to support us.
Now we sell a range of cheeses from cheese makers from all over the UK and a few from France, many using milk from their own or local herds, with cheeses made on farm. We also sell our milk to a local soap maker who uses it in her products. I’m always looking for ways to support British farming, reduce packaging and sell locally.
When Species Meet is a film by Xiuxing Wu about the goats and cheese making at Handley Farm