Starter Culture Basics ran as a webinar at the end of November, and the recording has been getting steady replay traffic since — enough that we wanted to pull out what actually landed for the members who attended live. The session covered mesophilic versus thermophilic culture selection, how strain drift shows up in a finished wheel over a season, and the basic math of adjusting culture percentage for a colder make room.
That last point turned out to be the one people cared about most. December makes run colder than August makes for almost everyone outside a climate-controlled facility, and a culture percentage dialed in for summer ambient temperatures can leave you with a sluggish set in a chilly December cheese room. The instructor's rule of thumb — nudge culture up in small increments rather than changing your whole recipe — got repeated back in the chat more than once.
The question nobody planned for
The webinar wasn't supposed to be about supply, but it became partly about supply anyway. Several members asked what to do if their usual culture supplier is backordered or substituting a strain without much notice, which has been a live issue for smaller creameries this year. The short answer from the session: treat a new culture as a new variable, run it on a small batch before committing your whole vat to it, and keep your notes specific enough that you can tell, three months later, whether a flavor shift came from the culture or something else entirely.
That's not a glamorous answer, but it's the right one. A culture swap that goes unnoticed until a batch tastes different in February is a much harder problem to trace back than one that gets flagged and logged in December, while the change is fresh. The research on why this matters is more interesting than it sounds: the specific mix of lactic acid bacteria in a raw-milk culture does real work beyond acidification, shaping flavor and texture in ways that vary meaningfully between strains and even between batches of the same named strain. A "similar" substitute culture isn't automatically an equivalent one.
The session also spent time on a wrinkle that's easy to forget between winters: a colder make room doesn't just slow your culture, it changes the whole thermal profile of your day. If your cave or aging room sits in a building that's also fighting to keep its heating bill down this winter — and forecasters have been warning since fall that gas and electric heating costs are running well above last year's — you may be dealing with a colder ambient temperature everywhere, not just at the vat. Members running smaller spaces said in the chat that they've started logging room temperature at the same time they log culture percentage, specifically so they can tell later which variable actually moved.
That's a small habit, but it's the kind of thing that turns "the cheese tastes different this month" into "the room ran four degrees cooler starting the second week of December," which is a problem you can actually do something about.
If you missed it
The recording is available through your member portal under the Education tab, and it's a reasonable one to watch even if you've been making cheese for years — the culture-drift section alone is worth the twenty minutes. If starter culture selection is a recurring headache for your operation specifically, the Education Committee can point you toward members who've dealt with the same supplier issues and are willing to talk through what worked.
We don't have another webinar scheduled before the new year, but course registration for the winter session opens shortly, and we'll have more on what's in that catalog next week.
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.