Registration is open for a Lark Defect Diagnosis workshop on July 6, and we want to flag it early because it's one of the first in-person sessions we've scheduled in over a year that isn't a webinar wearing an event listing. It's a working session, held at a cheese-industry space in Brooklyn, capped small on purpose, and built around wheels members bring in rather than slides members watch.
That distinction matters more for this topic than almost any other in our program. Defect diagnosis is one of those skills that's genuinely difficult to teach through a screen, because so much of it depends on things a video call flattens out: the actual smell of a rind that's gone wrong, the give of a paste under your thumb, the difference between a surface mold that's a cosmetic problem and one that signals something deeper in the make. We ran a virtual version of this course through most of the past year, and it worked well enough for the diagnostic framework, but member feedback was consistent — they wanted a room and a table of actual wheels, not a gallery of photos.
What the session covers
The workshop walks through a structured way of narrowing down a defect: start with where on the wheel it shows up, move to when in the aging timeline it appeared, and only then start reasoning about likely causes in the make process, the cave environment, or the culture and coagulant choices that led there. It's the same framework taught in our standing coursework, but the in-person format means members walk out having actually diagnosed a real problem on a real wheel, with an instructor looking over their shoulder, rather than having matched a photo to a description in a slide deck.
Bring a problem wheel if you have one. Past sessions have worked through everything from unexpected blue mold on an otherwise clean rind to a paste that stayed chalky well past when it should have started to soften, and members tell us the diagnosis they walk through together sticks with them longer than any written case study does.
Getting there, and what to expect
We know an in-person, out-of-state workshop is a bigger ask right now than a webinar was, and that's a real cost some members can't take on this summer regardless of how the surrounding public health picture looks in their area. If that's you, our fall course calendar includes a virtual defect-diagnosis session built for exactly that; watch for the announcement rather than counting on a repeat of this specific format soon.
For members who can make the trip, capacity is genuinely limited, so register early if you're planning to come. Bring appropriate cold storage for anything you're transporting, and check with us ahead of time if you have questions about what kind of defect wheels are useful to bring versus what's better handled as a written question to the instructor beforehand.
It's a small thing in the scheme of a year like this one, but there's something real about being back in a room with other members looking at the same wheel and arguing, gently, about what went wrong. We're glad to be scheduling it again.
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.