Some members are still figuring out how to run a cave and a laptop at the same time, and this fall we spent an afternoon with one of them. She is an apprentice affineur at a small creamery in the upper Midwest, about eighteen months into the trade, and she is finishing her second course entirely on video — one screen propped against a shelf in the aging room, the other open to her notes.
"I never expected to be checking rind moisture with someone in another state watching," she told us. "But it's actually made me more careful about describing what I'm seeing, because I can't just point at it."
What the virtual format changed
Her creamery's aging room does not get reliable cell service, so her first virtual course, back in the spring, meant hauling a hotspot down to the cave floor every session. By this fall she had a fixed setup: a mounted phone, a notebook she keeps beside the keyboard, and a habit of narrating out loud — "moderate ammonia, even bloom, holding at fourteen days" — that she says has made her a sharper judge of her own wheels, camera or no camera.
She is not alone in that. Instructors across our virtual course slate have told us the same thing this year: members who have to describe a cheese for someone who cannot see or smell it end up building a more precise vocabulary than they had before. It is one of the few genuine upsides to a format nobody asked for.
The harder part has been the parts of the trade that do not translate to a screen at all — texture under the hand, the specific give of a paste at the right moment. She has been supplementing her coursework with an in-person mentor at her own creamery, checking her read against his before every session, which several members in the same position have told us is close to the only workaround that actually works.
Where she's headed
She expects to sit for her next credential level before the calendar turns, and says the biggest change in a year and a half is confidence — not in the cheese, but in her own judgment of it. "I used to wait for someone to tell me a wheel was ready. Now I mostly already know, and the class just confirms it."
If you are working toward a credential this fall and your setup is more improvised than ideal — a hotspot, a borrowed tripod, a notebook that does not quite fit the workflow — you are in good company. The Education Committee keeps a running list of low-cost setups members have found workable for aging-room video; ask us for it before your next enrollment window closes.
She also mentioned something we hear from a lot of members partway through a virtual course: the format forces a kind of record-keeping habit that in-person workshops rarely demand. When an instructor cannot lean over your shoulder and point at a rind, you learn to write down and photograph what you are seeing as a matter of course, not as an afterthought. Several of our other virtual cohorts this year have built similar habits — dated photo logs, short written notes after every check — that members tell us they have kept up long after the course itself ended, simply because it turned out to be useful on its own.
Her creamery is small enough that she wears a few hats besides affinage, and she was candid that the video setup took real trial and error before it stopped being a distraction. Her first attempt used a laptop balanced on a shelf, which fogged over within minutes of the cave door closing behind her. The mounted phone came after that failure, along with a cheap plastic sleeve to keep condensation off the lens. None of it was expensive, but all of it took a few wasted sessions to work out — which is exactly the kind of detail that does not show up in a course syllabus and only comes from someone who has actually tried it.
Asked what she would tell an apprentice starting the same course next spring, she did not talk about the technology at all. "Get comfortable saying what you see out loud before you're sure you're right. That's the actual skill. The camera is just the excuse to practice it."
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.