Our Workshop: Cave Cheesemaking session ran last Tuesday in Bra, in a cellar space that normally seats far more people than it held this year. We capped registration well below the usual number, spaced tables along the room's longer wall, and asked anyone who wasn't comfortable traveling to join a livestream feed instead — a format we'd never tried for this particular workshop before this year forced the question.
The cap wasn't just caution. Italy's national rules that month kept the one-meter distancing and indoor mask requirements from earlier in the summer in place through the end of September, and venues hosting any kind of gathering were expected to plan around both. A workshop that usually fills a room shoulder to shoulder simply couldn't run that way this year, so we redesigned the session around a smaller in-room group from the start rather than trying to fit the old format under new rules and hoping it held.
The workshop itself covers the part of cheesemaking that's hardest to teach from a book: reading a cave by feel, not just by the numbers on the wall. Attendees work through humidity troubleshooting, rind development timing, and the judgment calls that separate a wheel that's aging well from one that just looks fine today. It's a hands-on session by design, which made this year's version a genuine experiment — how much of "hands-on" survives when half the room is watching on a screen?
What translated and what didn't
The instructor walked the livestream group through the same wheels the in-room group was handling, holding each one up to the camera and narrating what her hands were finding — a give in the paste, a patch of unwanted mold, a rind that was drying faster on one side than the other. Members watching remotely told us afterward that the narration filled in more than they expected; you don't need to touch a wheel yourself to learn what "gives a little more than it should at three weeks" means once someone says it out loud while showing you.
What didn't translate as well was the in-room cross-talk — the side conversations between attendees comparing their own cave setups, which usually account for as much of the learning as the formal instruction does. We're going to try a structured discussion break in the livestream feed next time, so remote attendees get a version of that exchange instead of just watching one.
A few things didn't work as well as we'd hoped, and we'd rather say so than let this read as a tidier success than it was. The livestream audio picked up more cellar echo than we expected, and a couple of remote attendees told us they missed some of the instructor's quieter observations until we started running a live text chat alongside the feed for anyone to ask "what did she just say" in real time. We also underestimated how long the smaller in-room group would take to move through the same material — fewer people meant more individual questions per wheel, not fewer, and we ran about forty minutes past the scheduled end.
Both of those are fixable, and both are useful to know before the next hybrid session rather than after. If your region is planning something similar this fall, budget more time than the pre-pandemic version of the same workshop needed, and treat the remote audio setup as its own planning task rather than an afterthought bolted onto the in-room one.
If you're planning your own fall workshop calendar
The in-person session filled its capped seats within a day of opening, which tells us there's real appetite for hands-on learning even in a year like this one — just at a smaller scale than usual. If your region has enough interested members for a similarly small, similarly careful in-person session, talk to the Events Committee about what we've learned running this one; the room layout, the livestream setup, and the discussion-break idea are all things we can hand you rather than make you work out from scratch.
We don't have another in-person Cave Cheesemaking session scheduled yet, and we're not going to put one on the calendar until we're confident we can run it at a size that matches whatever the local rules allow at the time. In the meantime, the recording from last week's session — instructor narration, livestream chat, and all — is available to members through the Education Committee for anyone who wants to see how a smaller, hybrid version of a hands-on workshop actually played out.
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.