Most of what's on our calendar this year is still a screen and a login link, and for good reason — it's worked, and it's let members join from places a flight never would have made sense for. But on July 6, we're putting a small group of people in an actual room again: the Workshop: Lark Defect Diagnosis is running in person in Brooklyn, the first in-person session we've scheduled since last year.
It's a deliberately small one. Defect diagnosis is a hands-on skill — you learn to read a crumbly paste or an off rind by handling a lot of wheels with a lot of different problems, and that's still easier to teach with cheese on a table than cheese on a webcam, however good the webcam. We kept the room small on purpose, with spacing between stations and a capped roster, because the point is to get this one workshop right, not to prove a point about being back.
What the session covers
The workshop walks through the defects members flag most often in our support inbox: early gas formation, uneven rind development, and the paste texture problems that show up when a make schedule gets compressed. Each attendee brings or receives sample wheels with known issues and works through a diagnosis with guidance, the same format the workshop has used since it was added to the calendar. If you've been guessing at a recurring problem in your own cave and want a second set of eyes trained on exactly that kind of thing, this is the session built for it.
This isn't the only defect-focused training members have had access to this year. Several of our members completed a spring video-conference session covering cheese defects, cleaning and sanitizing, and basic troubleshooting earlier this spring, and the feedback we heard afterward was consistent: useful for spotting a problem, less useful for actually handling one. You can watch someone else diagnose a crumbly paste over a webcam, but you learn faster with a wheel in your own hands and someone standing next to you telling you what you're feeling. That's the gap this workshop is built to close, and it's part of why we chose to bring it back in person before anything else on the calendar.
If you're weighing whether to travel
We know not every member is ready to travel for a one-day workshop yet, and we're not pushing anyone to be. If Brooklyn isn't in the cards for you this summer, the diagnosis concepts from this workshop also show up, in a lighter form, in our online coursework — worth asking the Education Committee whether a virtual session is planned for later in the year if an in-person trip doesn't work for your schedule.
Seats are limited and have been filling since the roster opened. If you want one, don't wait until the week before to reach out — check the events page for registration details and get your name on the list.
We're planning this one carefully, in part because it's the model we'll use to decide how many more in-person sessions to add later this year. If Brooklyn goes well, expect a second small workshop before the end of the year in a different region. If you have thoughts about where that should be, the Events Committee is collecting requests now, and a workshop that fills fast in your area is the best argument you can make for it.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.