Twelve hundred goats. A sleek new state-of-the-art dairy. Upgraded barns. New employees. A huge investment in the future and then…Covid shut down the world. 

“We got the keys to this place the last week of March 2020,” artisan cheesemaker Veronica Pedraza tells me with a chuckle. She can laugh about it now but, at the time, there was nothing funny about it. “I was set to make my first batch of cheese the first week of April when the Department of Agriculture told me they were suspending inspections and licensing while the Stay-at-Home order was in place. So, here I was ready to make cheese, but I couldn’t.”

It was a stressful time for Veronica whose 13-year journey in food production and cheesemaking led her to this small goat farm near the shores of Lake Michigan in Port Washington. Originally from Miami and a graduate of Beloit College, Veronica fell in love with food while working in a high-end Chicago restaurant as line cook, but it was cheese that really piqued her interests. “I became fascinated by the fact that all of the cheeses we were getting in were just from four ingredients: milk, cultures, rennet and salt and it was like, ‘how do you get all of this variety from just these four ingredients?’”

Her search to answer that question led her to an apprenticeship with Sweet Grass Dairy in Georgia, a creamery manager at Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont, and a cheese maker at Meadowood Farms in upstate New York where she won numerous awards. But it was a serendipitous encounter at the annual Vermont Cheese Council Pancake Breakfast where she was seated next to Andy Hatch from Wisconsin’s Uplands Cheese that brought her back to the Dairy State. 

“I lamented to Andy that my time at Meadowood was probably coming to a close and he said, ‘Well, I know someone who has a goat farm and they’ve always wanted to make cheese. Would you like me to put you in touch?’ I didn’t really expect anything to come of it.”

Instead she got a call from Milwaukee’s Juli Kaufmann, president of Fix Development LLC (the group behind such redevelopment projects as The Sherman Phoenix, the Clock Shadow Building and other Milwaukee landmarks). Juli put Veronica In touch with the owner of a goat dairy in Port Washington. It was a job Veronica was particularly well suited for. “A lot of farmstead creamery start-ups have this problem where they start with 150 goats or something and they start making cheese and then the demand for the cheese starts surpassing the supply of raw milk and they’re sort of put in this position of scaling up their herd which requires more investment and it becomes hard to get out of that cycle.”

Blakesville Creamery, however, was ready to go out of the gate for people to discover their fantastic goat cheese varieties including the delectable, creamy fresh Chevre and their incomparable Lake Breeze variety that has a velvety texture and an herbal, minerally earthiness.

“Milk is alive,” Veronica tells me as she uses a white board to diagram how goat cheese differs from cow’s milk cheese. “It’s a living thing and so is cheese. I like to think of cheese as an uncolonized planet when its first made and then you have all of these microorganisms that whether they’re lactic acid, bacteria or yeast molds— they’re all kind of working in symbiosis with each other to colonize something but it’s never the same and that’s what makes it so interesting.”

And like a true artist she’s always looking to improve, “Sometimes it’s hard to enjoy it and not be critical of it. I can always find something that needs work but that’s also what I really love about it. It’s never boring.”

Try some of Blakesville’s creamy goat cheeses at Outpost today and discover the goat’s milk difference.