Chewelah Creamery Gets Cheesy

Columbia Community Creamery expanded their business on March 2 with the completion of their first batch of cheese, beginning with cheddar curds. Board member Virginia Thomas said that they will begin making feta the second week of March. Upcoming varieties include Monterey Jack, aged block cheddar, pepperjack, spreadable, and red lester – a “cousin to cheddar.” The creamery will also offer a dry cottage curd, which can be mixed with a chosen dressing to create cottage cheese or may be added “anywhere you want an extra protein.”

“We're doing lots of flavors on our curd,” Thomas continued. “So we have things like mango tango, Maui Waui, honey habanero, and Mediterranean – pretty much anything we can think of that we can find a good spice blend. We have been sourcing some of the spice blends from Spiceology, which is out as Spokane.”

Their cheese was featured at the Colville Home and Garden Show last weekend, and they are working to get the newest product into some local stores. Their fluid milk products, yogurt, and ice cream are still available in Chewelah, where they first opened their doors in 2023 as a nonprofit. According to Thomas, milk that was bottled and taken to markets such as Yokes, Huckleberry’s, and Scale House Market of Spokane is being used to make cheese. 

Thomas said, “We started with fluid milk in glass bottles. And then we expanded out into yogurt and ice cream. We started adding retail space for other farmers so that they could sell their products, too – like eggs, sourdough, beef, and honey. As things changed over this last year, we were having some issues with our supply chain, like getting glass bottles, ingredients were going up in price, and we were maxed out in our capacity. There's only so much milk we can process, bottle, store, and transport ourselves.”

Fixing their in-store milk dispenser has allowed customers to use their own containers. Then the board began exploring other products to ease supply and demand capabilities. “One of the key products was cheese,” Thomas said. “The benefits of switching to cheese production is we can take in more milk. It's about a 1-to-1 ratio, so if we do 400 gallons of milk, we'll get about 400 pounds of cheese. So, we can immediately start buying more milk than we were previously, because we can send that cheese out further. With fluid milk, you really need to process, package, and distribute within that week and with cheese, it gives us a little bit more breathing room.” 

She also explained that cheese offers flexibility in storage and distribution. It can be sold immediately or aged. Or it could be mailed and sent to small regional distributors on the west side of the state, or to neighboring states such as Oregon or Idaho. “With fluid milk, our licensing was only for the state of Washington, so we also couldn't cross any state lines,” Thomas said.

She continued, “We also noticed as a board that there was quite a void of cheese production. We have some great local artisan cheesemakers and the WSU (Washington State University) Creamery. But otherwise there's really a hole that could be filled with good, quality, local cheese.” She said that cheese has deep roots in the Colville River Valley, noting that since the first cows arrived in 1826, cheese and butter helped families preserve dairy through the winter. Thomas said, “They actually traded cheese and butter all the way to the Russians in Alaska, so cheese has always been important in this valley.”

Reviving that tradition aligns with the creamery’s mission to “rebuild local processing,” according to their website. Thomas said, “We can help more farmers buy more milk; we can get more food into our local community. We can get food into the schools. They also plan for cheese to become part of the Farm to School Program for kids. And then, as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, that just means we will have more funds to do things with youth and agriculture [and to] support other projects in our own community.”

Columbia Community Creamery currently sources milk from three farms: Clover Mountain Dairy, Bettydon Jerseys/Lake Wolf Creamery, and Heinemann Dairy. With cheese production underway, they now purchase an additional 100 gallons of milk each week.

“And then also,” she said, “cheese is just delicious. There's just so many different varieties of cheeses, and people are so passionate about cheese. So it's a really good fit for this time that the Creamer is at.”