Prison's Cheesemakers in Colo.

An interesting article going around Yahoo lists.

Prison's goats fuel industry
By Douglas Brown
DENVER POST
Sunday, Jul. 19 2009
CANON CITY, Colo. - The men wearing green uniforms and tall rubber boots spread
out across the compound, herding goats into pens, pouring grain into feeding
troughs and serving as nursemaids to those giving birth.

Many of them, all inmates at Skyline Correctional Center in Canon City, had
never touched a goat or heard one bleat before becoming involved with Colorado
Correctional Industries, a division of the state Department of Corrections.
It's likely, too, that few of the prisoners had ever tasted goat cheese.

But that's what happens to nearly every drop of milk the prisoners draw from
the animals, most of which goes to Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy in Longmont in
northern Colorado. Cheesemakers there transform thousands of gallons of milk
from the Canon City goats into chevre logs, cubes of feta, pungent rounds of
raw milk cheese and more.

And then a shopper at a Costco or a cheese connoisseur at a gourmet boutique in
Philadelphia, or a diner at a fancy restaurant in San Diego will buy the
cheese. The diner will chew the slice of Red Cloud and marvel over its
evocative flavor.

How does milk from a prison complex in remote central Colorado end up in a
high-end restaurant?

It begins in the pen.

Tall, muscular, tattooed and in prison for cocaine distribution, Thomas R.
Major III seems an unlikely nurturer of goats.

But a year into his seven-days-a-week apprenticeship, he's a leader of the
goat-milk operation.

"It's human nature. You get attached to something the more you hang out with
it," said Major, 31, as 56 goats standing on a pair of concrete platforms on
either side of him ate grain as they were milked. Between the goats' staccato
cries and the rhythmic shushing sound of the milking machines, he had to nearly
shout to make himself heard.

It takes about two minutes to milk a goat, and when they all are finished,
prisoners herd them out through one door and usher in the next group of goats
for milking.

Major and the other 29 men who tend the animals give them vaccinations, trim
their hooves, move around hay, build barns, clean the milking machines and do
everything else it takes to run a goat farm.

By the end of the summer, the prisoners will manage about 2,000 goats,
including Alpines, Nubians and Toggenburgs, said Mary Provost, who oversees the
operation.

Most of the minimum-security prisoners shrug when asked whether they will
pursue careers in livestock when they emerge from prison.

Not Vincent Gonzalez, 26, who is in for kidnapping.

"I like milking," said Gonzalez as he cleaned equipment in a small, humid room
full of stainless steel tanks. "When I get out, hopefully, my parents have land
near Calhan. They want me to learn as much as possible so I can open a goat
business."

Gonzalez has studied every aspect of the trade. He even learned how to ferment
cheese, which would make him one of the few prisoners who can imagine what
happens to all of that white liquid after Haystack employee Bill Napier pulls
up in his truck, pumps 9,000 pounds of milk into a refrigerated steel tank, and
drives back to the dairy.

Haystack buys milk from the prison because it is the only nearby farm large
enough to accommodate the dairy's needs, said Haystack's Chuck Hellmer.

In June, Haystack took about 110,000 pounds of Canon City milk.

A day after Napier delivers the milk to Haystack, Wendy Freund puts rennet, a
substance used to coagulate milk, into a vat holding 1,800 pounds of raw goat
milk.

Five minutes later, Freund presses her finger on the milk; it has developed a
skin.

She dips a steel device called a harp into the vat and begins pulling the milk
toward her, breaking the curds into smaller pieces. She raises the temperature
slowly, and switches tools, from the harp, which was sort of like the frame of
a paddle strung with wires, to a rake.

Freund got the gig three years ago, after moving to Longmont from Houston. She
knew nothing about cheese, but was intrigued by the ad for a cheesemaker in the
Longmont newspaper. Now she's passionate about the subject.

"Cheese is a living creature," she said. "It's like a big science project every
day."

After raking the curds, Freund hauls scoops of them from the tank and packs
them into cheesecloth-lined wheels. The rounds of wet curds drain for a day,
and by the time they are placed in a walk-in refrigerator they have gelled and
hardened.

Haystack turns the goat milk harvested by prisoners into a variety of cheeses,
from their best-selling chevre logs, which feature the kind of simple,
pasteurized goat cheese that you can spread like thick hummus, to Sunlight, a
raw-milk cheese that you slice.

Soon, they may be adding a camembert to the list, a project the head
cheesemaker, Jackie Chang, has been working on since January.

"I wanted a mushroomy, lemony taste," said Chang, in red rubber boots and red
shorts one afternoon as a fresh load of milk from the prison arrived. "That's
the part about my job I love, experimenting every day. It's like raising kids.
Lots of caring, lots of love."

The product of at least some of Chang's - and the prisoners' - toil ends up
every week at the Denver restaurant Rioja, where Haystack cheese makes
appearances in a variety of dishes.

Chef and owner Jennifer Jasinski buys so much goat cheese from Haystack that
the company ships it to the restaurant, instead of going through a distributor.

"There are much cheaper ones out there," Jasinski said during a recent lunch
rush. "But the quality is the first answer. I think it's an excellent product.
And I like that it's 40 minutes away."

Elsewhere in the kitchen a cook placed dollops of a Haystack goat-cheese and
artichoke mousse onto squares of fresh pasta, which he then folded into
tortelloni, which are large versions of tortellini.

The dish - the pasta served in an artichoke broth and draped with shavings of
Haystack's Queso de Mano - is the restaurant's signature, said Jasinski.

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