Our April 2011 meeting was hosted by Anne Bossi and Bob Bowen of Sunset Acres Creamery in Brooksville. We had a tour of their *working* cheese room (curds scooped and draining as we looked in), learned about how they try to control humidity in their cheese caves, and saw how they heat their water so efficiently that they no longer need solar hot water panels! Plus lots of discussion on a variety of topics, among them them the pending legislation around dairy and raw milk sales, hooking up milk producers with cheese makers, hooking up retailers with cheese producers, and hooking up young cheesemakers with land and facilities to make more Maine cheese, which the market is demanding…

Sarah Spring invited the Guild to visit her at her micro-creamery in Durham for our February meeting. Her house sits on a sunny rise on a back road and ably accommodate the large group that met there to discuss efforts to get Maine cheesemakers to participate in the ACS conference, info about current and future workshops, the importance of the upcoming Sanitation Workshop, and especially the fate of legally making raw milk cheeses while the state of Maine is trying to allow unregulated cheeses into the marketplace, and the Feds are thinking about scrapping any tolerance of unpasteurized dairy products. Needless to say there was much to talk about, and much to act on. Stay tuned.