Isle of Mull Cheese

"The last remaining traditional farmhouse cheese from the Hebridean Islands and the only dairy farm on the island, everyone else is far more sensible!
All of our cheese is made with unpasteurised milk from our hardy, healthy, island cows fed on grass and whiskey grains from the Tobermory Distillery.

The making of cheese on the Scottish Isles has been a long practiced way of conserving the rich plentiful milk in the spring and early summer. Hard cheeses such as ours were traditionally made as there would be a long wait until the cheese could reach the market, and soft cheese would not travel or last so well. Although now here at Sgriob-Ruadh we calve and milk all year round, meaning we have a consistent supply of milk for our cheese making, in the past making cheese was used to preserve the smaller quantities which were available only at certain times of year.
Fine cheese, of course, can not be made with out the very best of milk. No cheese is made with fresher milk than that used at Sgriob-ruadh. Here, in the morning, as the cows are milked, their milk is taken directly from the milking parlour to the cheese-making vat. This is the freshness denied to the large scale, factory-like cheese-making plant of today, who must first collect their milk by road-tanker from many farms over a wide area.
Milk deserves to be treated more kindly! By having complete control over its production and care, we are able to ensure that at all times it gets the respect it deserves. Isle of Mull Cheese milk is therefore spared the effrontery of pasteurisation. We believe pasteurisation to be unnecessarily brutal way of treating milk to be used for the making of Isle of Mull Cheese. Far too many of those organisms, which have the potential to create individualism and maturity of flavour, are indiscriminately sacrificed in the process.