HERO CHEESE Lindley
Lindley in all its glory
Jake Goldstein came to cheesemaking by an unconventional route. Before Covid, he ran bars and restaurants. When that world collapsed, he found himself reassessing what he actually wanted to do. After a brief spell training as a butcher, he turned to something he already loved: cheese.
He completed Academy of Cheese Level 1, began contacting local cheesemakers and learnt his craft first at Monkland, then later with Charlie Westhead at Neal’s Yard Creamery.
Only a few years on, Jake is now founder and cheesemaker at Primrose Creamery on the Welbeck Estate – and his cheeses are already attracting serious attention.
Great cheese needs great milk,” he says. Primrose works with the estate’s raw milk, benefiting from the farming and dairy foundations established over many years by Joe Schneider of Stichelton. Jake takes warm afternoon milk, naturally richer in fat, and begins cheesemaking while it is still close to the cow’s body temperature.
There is something beautifully direct about that process. Rather than cooling, heating, cooling and reheating milk through pasteurisation, Jake can take warm raw milk and begin making cheese. It uses considerably less energy, but, more importantly for Jake, leaves intact the character he wants his cheeses to express.
Jake & Kate Goldstein
That immediacy matters. Jake believes raw milk carries the changing pasture, seasons and farm into the finished cheese. Rather than demanding absolute consistency, he embraces a degree of variation.
“Our vintage is every day,” he says. “It’s what the cow eats, what the humidity is in the air.”
It’s a brilliant way of looking at cheese. We happily accept that one wine vintage tastes different from another, yet somehow expect cheese to taste identical every time. Jake wants people to discover the pleasure in those differences.
It is an idea that sits at the heart of Primrose Creamery: control what you can, but don’t iron all the life out of the cheese. Milk is a living ingredient, and Jake is interested in the small shifts in aroma, texture and flavour that come with season, weather and pasture.
He describes himself as somewhere between two schools of cheesemaking: the instinctive maker who knows when something is ready simply by touch, smell and experience, and the obsessive data collector armed with spreadsheets, temperatures and timings. Jake sees value in both. Cheesemaking, after all, happens in a living environment, not a laboratory.
Welbeck itself provides an extraordinary backdrop. Primrose is based at the School of Artisan Food, where Jake also teaches dairy production. With a bakery next door and a brewery across the road, there is a community of makers around him – a far cry from the isolation that can come with cheesemaking.
Nowhere is his philosophy clearer than in Lindley.
Originally inspired by rich, creamy French cheeses, Lindley gradually became something distinctly its own: luscious, deeply creamy and deliberately complex, with floral, fruity, yeasty and occasionally almost boozy notes.
Jake has refined the cheese without trying to tame its personality. Cooler maturation and subtle changes to the cultures have brought greater balance, but Lindley still retains the individuality that makes it exciting.
His ambition is straightforward: make cheese that feels luxurious but remains food rather than ceremony.
“It’s about feeding people,” he says. “I want them to think: this is the real deal. This is what I should be eating.”
So seek out Lindley, taste it while Primrose Creamery is still at the beginning of its story, and pay attention to what changes from one piece to the next. This is a young cheesemaker finding his voice, with exceptional milk, a remarkable place and the confidence to let both speak through the cheese. Jake Goldstein is one to watch.