Registration is open for this year's Starter Culture Basics webinar, a virtual session we run every fall for members who work with cultures daily but never had a formal introduction to how they actually behave. It's free, it runs a little under two hours, and it's built for the person who inherited a make sheet and a culture schedule from a predecessor and has been following it faithfully without ever quite knowing why it's written the way it is.
That's a more common situation than you'd think. We hear from members constantly who took over a cheese program mid-stream — bought a creamery, hired into a role, or simply outlasted the person who used to own the culture decisions — and who've been making good cheese on inherited habits rather than working knowledge. This session is aimed squarely at them.
What the session actually covers
The webinar walks through the basic biology of mesophilic and thermophilic starter cultures, why a make sheet calls for one over the other at a given step, and what actually happens when a culture underperforms — is it the culture, the milk, or the room? We spend real time on the diagnostic side, because that's the part members tell us they're missing most: not "what culture do I use" but "how do I tell what went wrong when the culture didn't do what I expected."
We're also building in more time this year for phage — the bacterial viruses that can quietly wreck a culture's performance without an obvious cause — since it's the question that comes up most in our post-webinar office hours. If you've ever had an unexplained slow set with no other variable changed, this is worth your evening.
The session closes with a section we added last year after member feedback: how to keep a culture log that actually helps you the next time something goes wrong. Most small operations track lot numbers and little else, which is fine until a set runs slow twice in one month and there's no record of what else was different — room temperature, milk supplier, how long the culture sat out before pitching. A simple log doesn't fix a bad culture, but it turns "this happens sometimes" into a pattern you can actually chase down.
Timely, if you're revisiting fall pricing anyway
This has been a fall where a lot of members are already reworking their cost assumptions, given how far feed prices have climbed this year. A slow or failed set isn't just an inconvenience in a season like this one — it's wasted milk at a moment when milk itself costs more than it has in years, which makes troubleshooting a culture problem quickly worth more than it used to be. Specialty cheese demand has stayed strong industry-wide even as broader grocery spending tightens, so the margin for wasted batches is thinner than the strong milk price alone would suggest.
The webinar is virtual and free to attend, though registration is required and space is capped to keep the Q&A portion useful. If you've been meaning to get a newer team member up to speed on culture fundamentals before winter production ramps up, this is an easy one to send them to instead of explaining it yourself for the third time this year. Registration details and the session link are available through the Education Committee; reach out if you don't see the confirmation email within a day of signing up.
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.