Meeting: June 15th at Appleton Creamery

Our next Guild meeting will take place at Appleton Creamery in Appleton, ME on Monday, June 15th at 10am.

The PIZZA OVEN will be fired up, rain or shine, so bring your favorite melty cheese and toppings to share.

We will review the Dairy Sanitation Workshop just held in Orono, discuss the upcoming Peter Dixon workshop (November 13/14 at Pineland Farms), and study the logistics for shipping our ACS competition entries to Providence at the end of July, among other topics.

DIRECTIONS:

Google Maps sometimes does not recognize the number 780 on Gurneytown Road in Appleton, but you can also Google just the road name and Appleton, ME for general directions, then look for Appleton Creamery near the northern end of the road on the west side. Please park on the side of the road — their driveway is very short and hard to turn around in.

Maine Cheese Guild

ACS Conference Grant Opportunities

At our Annual Meeting last November we committed to sending as large a group as possible to this year’s American Cheese Society conference in Providence, RI July 29th through August 1s. To that end we committed to offering partial grants to UP TO TEN (or as many as we can afford) Guild members to help them with the cost of attendance; the grants would pay for the Early Bird conference fee of around $500, which would be roughly half of total expenses. (Be aware that you must also be a member of ACS to attend the conference, and to submit competition entries.)

It’s time to ask our members to apply to the Guild so that we know how many folks are interested so we can budget accordingly.

If you can commit to attending the ACS Conference this summer and would like to apply for a guild Grant to do so, please write

—one paragraph describing you and your cheese experience,
—and one paragraph describing what you seek to gain by attending the ACS conference;
—your name and contact info;
—send to info@mainecheeseguild.org with the subject “Guild Grant Request” BEFORE our April 13th meeting.

At that meeting the group will discuss the number of folks seeking a grant, and given our current finances how many grants the Guild can afford to offer. If there are more grant seekers than grants available, the Guild board will review the applications and choose whom will receive Grants before the end of the Early Bird registration.

In addition to conference fee grants, the Guild has committed to offering to pay the entry fee for any Guild member’s first ACS competition entry, and to subsidize a group shipment of all Guild entries into the competition. More info about that effort later this year.