Seeing the Wood for the Cheese

At Wyke, we’re proud to be ahead of the curve when it comes to sustainable farming, but the way we make our Cheddar is unashamedly traditional. We still use our secret family recipe and our 100-year-old starter culture, and we still follow the same cheesemaking process as the generations before us, with the same care and attention and without cutting corners.

One of the final ways we ensure our Cheddar is better than the rest comes when we set it aside to develop the special creaminess, crumbliness and smoothness that makes it Wyke. We age it in traditional wooden maturing boxes, kept to just the same temperature as the old stone barn used all the way back when our family started cheesemaking over 160 years ago.

These boxes have many advantages. First off, they keep our Cheddar in shape rather than allowing it to sink, and they also maintain it an even temperature, ensuring that the maturation is steady. Beyond this, they’re natural and sustainable. And finally, they’re reusable. In fact, some of our boxes have been helping to make our Cheddar for a very long time indeed – and we can prove it.

“They can easily do 25, 30 years,” says Graham Rolls, our Maturing Store Manager, the man in charge of the boxes and the store that’s kept at a constant 13ºC. “Though it does depend what forklift driver hits them,” he adds. Thirty is a pretty impressive number  but, according to Rich Clothier, our MD and fourth-generation cheesemaker, some of them have been around for a great deal longer – and he should know.

Back in the mid-1970s, Rich and his brother Tom, now our Production Director, were set to work by their father John, then running Wyke. The boys, aged eight and 12, were given a simple but important job: to paint spots onto the wooden boxes. This wasn’t just to keep them out of trouble but had a practical purpose. At the time, Wyke’s Cheddar went to a separate distribution centre that collected cheese from farmers across Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, some of whom used noticeably inferior boxes to age theirs. The spots would ensure that we held onto our stronger boxes, which would be easy to identify and collect.

As the boys set to work, the elder Tom decided he would take on a supervisory role. He chose red paint and gave Rich green, and they settled down to work. The system worked, and the boxes continued to circulate, and remained in use long after Wyke brought them home permanently when we took over our own distribution. In fact, nearly 50 years later, the two brothers still spot green- or red-spotted boxes – though younger brother Rich will tell you that, strangely, the green have always outnumbered the red.

These days, some of the boxes have different identifications on them. There’s a new Wyke tradition of signing them, with visitors from as far afield as China and Ukraine leaving their mark in the Maturing Room. It will be down to the next generation of Wyke cheesemakers to see if these will still be around for a half century, helping to make our very special Cheddar.