Workshop: Birch Competition Prep is next Wednesday, June 21, and registration closes the day before. If you have a wheel you are debating whether to enter this season, this is the workshop that helps you decide, not the one that assumes you already have.
The session runs through the mechanics that trip up first-time entrants every year: how category descriptions are actually worded, what a judge is scoring versus what a customer is tasting, and how much variation between wheels in the same batch is normal versus disqualifying. Judging in competitions of this kind typically pairs a technical evaluator, scoring for flaws and defects, with an aesthetic evaluator, scoring for character and craft — two very different lenses on the same wheel. If you have ever pulled ribbons for one wheel of a batch and gotten silence for another wheel from the same vat, this is the workshop that explains why that happens and what to do about it before you ship samples.
Who tends to get the most out of it
Two kinds of members show up to this one. The first is someone entering for the first time, usually with a flagship cheese they are proud of and no real sense of how the paperwork and shipping logistics work. The second is someone who has entered for a few years running and wants to move from "we got an honorable mention" to "we know exactly why we didn't place higher." Both leave with a checklist, and the second group usually leaves with a much longer list of questions for their own make sheet.
We have heard from members who treat this workshop as a pre-season ritual now — one head cheesemaker told us she blocks the date every year the way she blocks her spring rennet order, because getting the entry paperwork wrong costs more time than the workshop does. That is not a bad way to think about it. An entry rejected on a technicality is a wasted shipping cost and a wasted wheel.
What to bring
Bring your actual candidate wheel's specs, not a hypothetical one: make date, aging window, target category, and any label copy you are planning to submit alongside it. The session leader will walk through a mock entry using a sample cheese, but the exercise is far more useful if you are filling in your own numbers instead of watching someone else's. If you are still deciding between two wheels for the same category, bring notes on both — a beautifully made washed-rind wheel entered in the wrong bracket does not place, no matter how good it tastes.
This workshop exists because the flagship in-person competition season has come roaring back the last two years, after a stretch where entries and attendance both thinned out. If your creamery sat out competition entirely during that stretch, this is a low-stakes way back in — a workshop, not a judged event, with no pressure beyond showing up with questions.
Registration is open through Tuesday. If you are on the fence about entering this year, come to the workshop first and decide afterward — that is exactly what it is for.
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.