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In wheels, in slabs, in curds, in cubes, this hemisphere's finest cheeses entered the arena.
Minneapolis is home now to the American Cheese Society's biggest competition of the year, drawing top cheesemakers, cheesemongers and cheese appreciators to judge the great and the gouda.
In the days leading up to Friday's championship round, volunteers pushed carts loaded with bries, blues and burratas through the maze of Huntington Bank Stadium. Thirty-four judges in white lab coats waited, in teams of two, at long rows of tables, cheese knives at the ready.
At each table, each team gave each one of this year's 1,318 entries their full attention. They sliced, sniffed, scrutinized, savored. They waved bits of cheese excitedly around, alerting the other cheese lovers in the room to a new cheese they might love.
"As you walk by, they'll say 'You should try this, this is really delicious,'" said Rachel Perez,judging and competition chairwoman for the event.
The competition started 40 years ago, when "American cheese" was more likely to conjure images of rubbery slices wrapped in plastic.
That's not what Perez sees when she looks around at this year's entries.
"There's some beautiful, beautiful stuff that comes through here," she said. "You have cheese in blocks and forms; some of the marinated cheeses you see are beautiful, packed in oil with herbs and garlic and lemon."
This year's winners will be announced in July and posted on the American Cheese Society site, if you want to search your dairy aisle for a taste of champion cheese. The American Cheese Society hopes you do.
"The best way to support American cheese," Perez said, "is to buy American cheese."
On Thursday, the cheeses were competing in individual categories. By Friday, the very best had moved to the championship round: Best in show. In 2022, the honor went to Whitney, a raclette-style cheese made by Vermont-based Jasper Hill Farm.
Eight Minnesota producers entered this year's show. It was a blind judging, so there was no way to know if the cheeses that made the judges smile on Thursday were Minnesota cheeses. But there's no reason to believe they weren't.
Winners get bragging rights. Everyone who entered gets valuable feedback from the food scientists, professors, producers and marketing professionals who served as judges.
And everyone involved, including the 70 volunteers who moved all that cheese, gets to take home the leftovers. Any cheese remaining — last year, it was a dozen towering carts of championship cheese — will be donated to local food shelves.
"Look at these guys over here," Perez said, nodding to a pair of judges carefully tunneling into the center of a great cheese wheel with a long device called a trier. After a contestant shipped four 80-pound wheels of emmental to the competition a few years ago, the American Cheese Society advised members to keep their entries to a more manageable size.
"They're going to cut it open," she said. "They're going to look at it, they're going to taste it together, they're going to talk a little bit about it."
No one can eat an entire Gopher stadium full of cheese. Like a wine tasting, the judges had buckets handy and a table full of palate cleansers like fruit and crackers.
The Cheese Olympics moved to Minneapolis — with its convenient location and cheese-friendly stadium — permanently this year. No comment from Wisconsin as yet.
Each judging day started with the mildest dairy products — cream cheese, cottage cheese, mascarpone — and ended with the wildest. The washed rind cheeses you can smell before you see. The new flavored cheese curds that taste like an entire turkey dinner, right down to the side of cranberries.
The competition is meant to be a celebration of the craft and ingenuity of American cheese, and the people who make it possible.
"Cheddar is a verb," said Alyce Birchenough, a veteran cheesemaker, recently retired from decades of pressing, stacking and cheddaring cheeses on her Alabama homestead. She volunteered at the first competition 40 years ago and has been helping out ever since.
We see cheese on a cracker. Birchenough sees the science and alchemy that goes into each slice. How the pasture where a cow grazes, the cow's age, even the weather, can affect the flavor of each batch of cheese.
"It's a wonderful time to be a cheesemaker," she said. "I looked around at a lot of things but I never found anything I enjoy as much. … What a nutritionally dense, delicious food it is."
