The secrets behind the AOP farmhouse Brie de Meaux

At the heart of everything we do is our herd of 250 cows at Ferme des 30 Arpents, and an ancestral artisanal know-how that we are committed to preserving. Fed almost exclusively on the farm's own grass and cereals, our cows are milked whenever they want, thanks to the installation of a milking robot. Stress-free milking for quality milk! Once the cows have been milked, the milk goes straight into the vats of the cheese dairy, located next to the barn. It doesn't get much shorter than that! The milk is then processed on site, skimmed, cold-ripened and then hot-ripened before fermenting. Once fermentation is complete, we add rennet to enable the milk to go from a liquid to a solid state. This is what we call the curd, which is then sliced into small, centimetre-sized pieces for hand-moulding with a traditional flat Brie shovel. The molded cheeses are then stacked between rush mats and turned over regularly by hand to allow the whey to drain off gently. Lastly, as tradition dictates, the farmhouse cheeses are salted, again by hand, before maturing in the hâloirs.

To qualify for AOP status, a Brie de Meaux must spend at least 4 weeks in the cellar, but we prefer to leave it between 6 and 8 weeks to guarantee perfect ripening! It's thanks to our strict adherence to the Brie de Meaux AOP specifications and the use of raw milk in the production of our cheeses that we can benefit from the "Fermier" and "AOP" designations. It's a double distinction that only we can claim, and only we can claim it worldwide!