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Good Taste: When local beer meets local cheese

Cheese(s) of the month, bolstered by beer. (Beer makes just about everything better.)

Keswick Creamery Tommenator.
Keswick Creamery Tommenator.Read moreJessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

Cheese(s) of the month, bolstered by beer

Beer makes just about everything better, and it's especially true with washed-rind cheese, whose flavors take on extra dimensions when yeasty brew is added to a brine brushed across the rind during aging.

Two excellent examples using local beers come from Pennsylvania farms.

Tommenator from Keswick Creamery near Newburg in Cumberland Valley is a semi-firm raw milk tomme, whose naturally mild flavor takes on a hoppy tang and malty resonance, thanks to a Troegenator double bock from Tröeg's Brewing Co.

A considerably more assertive beer cheese is the funky wedge from Calkins Creamery in Honesdale called Levon's Luck, a softer round that reminds Aimee Olexy at Talula's Garden (where it's included on cheese plates) of a Tomme Crayeuse. This buttery raw milk cheese gets marinated with orange peel and coriander before it's washed with hefeweizen wheat beer from 3 Guys and a Beer'd in Carbondale. The resulting mottled and sticky crust can be borderline salty (each wheel varies), but also sparks with pepper and floral spice notes that are a natural, says Olexy, with mustard, summer sausage and, yes, a cold beer.


Keswick Creamery Tommenator, $24.95 a pound at the Fair Food Farmstand (215-386-5211) in the Reading Terminal Market.

Calkins Creamery Levon's Luck, Talula's Daily (208 W. Washington Square, 215-592-6555).