Posted on 11/28/2025 10:32:25 PM PST by Red Badger
KEY TAKEAWAYS
* Beehive Cheese from Utah earned five bronze awards at the World Cheese Awards.
* The event in Bern, Switzerland, featured 5,244 entries judged by 265 experts.
* Beehive's award-winning cheeses include Apple Walnut Smoked and Barely Buzzed varieties.
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UINTAH, Weber County — The Beehive State is known for many things, but if you asked a Utahn to list them, cheese likely wouldn't be one of the things mentioned.
But Britton Welsh and Uintah-based Beehive Cheese Company are looking to change that.
Beehive Cheese in November traveled all the way to Bern, Switzerland, to showcase its cheese at the 37th edition of the World Cheese Awards — the world's foremost cheese event.
The competition saw a record-breaking 5,244 entries from 46 countries across the globe. The cheeses were evaluated and judged by a panel of 265 leading cheese experts, including affineurs, graders and producers, as well as retailers, journalists, broadcasters and other industry specialists.
"They've taken and just laid out all of these tables, and each table is filled full of cheeses. And then they divide out each table with about 50 cheeses. There were over 100 tables with each judging team with two or three judges from all over the world assessing the cheeses," said Welsh, president of Beehive Cheese.
"It was ripe. The cheeses were happy and excited to be there."
But Welsh and Beehive Cheese didn't make the trip from Utah to Switzerland with sightseeing in mind.
The family-owned creamery — founded in 2005 by Tim Welsh (Britton's father) and Pat Ford (Britton's uncle) — secured five coveted bronze awards at the competition.
This year's success continued to build on the foundation laid over the past two decades, bringing the creamery's lifetime World Cheese Awards medal count to 54 over 20 years.
Specifically, Beehive's Apple Walnut Smoked, Barely Buzzed, Promontory, Red Butte Hatch Chile, and Teahive cheeses each won a bronze award.
Promontory — Beehive's "mother cheese" — is a rich, buttery cheddar. Apple Walnut Smoked is cold-smoked with apples and walnut wood. Barely Buzzed is rubbed with espresso and lavender, Red Butte Hatch Chile with New Mexico Hatch chiles, and Teahive with Earl Grey tea, according to a statement from the creamery.
"What we learned early on is if we take our cheeses and rub the rinds at the beginning with our signature coffee rub, for example, or even sea salt with honey, as the cheese ages, not only do you have the milk flavors that are developing and the enzymes that are creating these wonderful, kind of, cheese flavors, but those enzymes and also the flavor rubs kind of dance together and blend together throughout the course of aging the cheese.
"So you end up with these subtle, very incredible flavoring that you don't necessarily get," Welsh said.
Welsh said there's "definitely" a sense of pride in putting Utah on the map and into discussions when it comes to cheese states.
"There's some big cheese states in the U.S., for example, Wisconsin or California, even New York, that has lots of really fun cheeses. However, I definitely think that even the U.S., I mean, we've only been a country for a couple hundred years, and we're going up against some of these cheeses ... these farms have been in families for longer than the United States has been around," Welsh said.
"So it's kind of fun seeing some of these, like, flavored U.S. cheeses that are still being acknowledged and awarded for quality, despite the fact that, I mean, Beehive, we've only been around for 20 years."
While the global recognition isn't exactly new for Beehive Cheese, it serves as a reminder of the standards Welsh holds himself and the creamery to when it comes to producing cheese.
"This is something that I've always talked through with our cheese makers, that no matter how we feel the cheese is the boss ... (it) takes just a lot of adapting to the circumstances and making sure that the cheese is high quality and just never being complacent because it's a craft and an art, but also a science that we focus on every day to deliver on amazing cheeses," Welsh said.
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I see you’ve taken up the banner for cheese this evening. I appreciate that greatly, as a cheeselover myself, and indeed in the midst of enjoying a large quantity of pasta with multiple cheese sauce garnished with pecorino romano.
Carry on, and I’m sure dfwgator or someone will post the requisite Python Cheese Shop sketch at some point.
Do you have any cheddar?
I suspect you meant "fared", or perhaps "faired" was a subtle pun whose meaning escaped me.....
We don’t get much call for it around these parts!.........
No pun, just intellectually deficient...............
I have made hot chocolate with Earl Gray and have made hot toddies with Earl Gray and lemon but never thought of using it to flavor cheese.
Interesting.
Beaver cheese and vagina yeast beer. Good eats....
Anyway, in 1966, Al Bundy scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, Bubba “Spare Tire” Dixon.
Thx for killin my appetite for this weekend
“There’s some big cheese states in the U.S., for example, Wisconsin or California, even New York,”
We had the best cheese factory in our little town in western NYS — part of a large dairy farming area of the state.
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