Isle of Mull Traditional Farmhouse Cheese

Cheesemonger

The Reades of Sgriob-ruadh (pronounced skibrooah, Gaelic for ‘red furrow’) Farm are the only dairy farmers on Mull. They run a mixed herd of Friesians, Holsteins, Jerseys, Ayrshires and one Ling, a Highland Shorthorn cross who “milks like a drain and gets her forage where more refined dairy cows wouldn’t dare to go”.

Cheese is made most days in the 400-gallon vat, using the unpasteurised evening and morning meal (milk) and working to a Cheddar-style recipe. They press for two days and mature for anything between six and 12 months, in 50 and 10lb clothbound or 1lb wax-finished truckles. As nothing much happens on Mull in the winter, “one of our prime concerns”, Chris Reade explains, “is to make in the winter and be able to sell in the summer”. Winter, do not forget, lasts longer up here – from October through to March – and the winter cheeses tend to be much paler in comparison to the buttercup-yellow of the summer ones.