Blue turns to gold for cheese pioneer

Kearney Blue Cheese, a new artisan cheese from Northern Ireland, won a major award at the recent International Cheese Festival in Nantwich. Kearney Blue, launched in April, took the award for the Best Irish Cheese - All Varieties.

Kearney Blue, a semi-hard cheese with a distinctive rind, an open texture and smooth, creamy flavour, is Northern Ireland's first artisan blue cheese. Based at Portaferry, County Down, in the picturesque Ards Peninsula, the handmade cheese is the brainchild of Paul McClean, who gave up his career as a project manager, to turn a lifelong love of blue cheese into a small business, Kearney Cheese Company.

The cheese is now being sold in 500g rounds to a leading deli in Northern Ireland and is attracting interest from cheese lovers in Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

The new blue cheese was among a record 3,700 competitors from 26 countries at the big Nantwich event, now in its 114thyear.

"Winning an award at Nantwich came as quite a surprise," says Mr McClean. "I decided to enter the cheese to obtain some feedback from the expert judging panel that would help me in the further development of a product that is essentially based on my own tastes and love of blue cheese

"I also saw a gap in the market particularly in Northern Ireland which doesn't have any real heritage in the development of farmhouse cheeses. To try to plug the gap, I started experimenting, in the summer of 2010, with different recipes and took a course in cheesemaking.

"Eventually, in April, I settled on a cheese that I liked. I gave family and friends samples to taste and then approached local hotels, delis and farm shops. The response has been immensely encouraging especially from Northern Ireland's leading hotel chain, which has included the cheese in its menus," he adds.

Kearney Blue, he says, has been created to evoke images of dry stonewalls and stone built windmills in the Ards Peninsula that help reinforce the provenance of the natural cheese, which uses milk from local farms.

"It has an open texture to allow the development of blue splodges throughout. The taste is creamy fresh with a balanced blue finish. Our initial objective is to build a portfolio of customers in delis, restaurants and foodservice.

"Overall, our aim is to produce the finest artisan blue cheese from the best Northern Irish milk and promote a quality blue cheese from Northern Ireland."