Registration is open for the Valley cohort of Starter Cultures & Coagulants, starting September 26, and it's a good week to mention it: this is one of those courses members tell us they wish they'd taken earlier, usually right after a batch went sideways for a reason that turned out to trace back to a decision made minutes into the make.
It's easy to think of the culture and coagulant choice as a formality — you pick the strain and the rennet type the recipe calls for, add them at the specified rate, and move on to the parts of the make that feel like they require more judgment: cutting, cooking, pressing. The course exists because that's backwards. Your culture selection sets the acid development curve for the entire make before you've done anything else to the milk, and a coagulant choice interacts with that curve in ways that aren't always obvious until something's already gone wrong downstream.
Why this is a cost problem, not just a craft one
This matters more this year than it usually would. With milk supply loosening some but input costs still elevated across the board, a batch lost to a preventable culture-and-set mismatch is an expensive place to learn a lesson you could have gotten in a classroom for less than the milk itself cost. Several members who've taken this course in past cohorts have told us the same thing: it didn't teach them a new recipe, it taught them why the recipes they already had worked, which turned out to be more useful for troubleshooting an unfamiliar batch or a new milk source. "I'd been swapping coagulants when a batch ran soft and just assuming it was the milk," one member from a small creamery told us after a past cohort. "Turned out I was fighting my own culture blend the whole time. Nobody had ever explained why the two choices interact instead of just sitting side by side on a spec sheet."
The course walks through mesophilic and thermophilic culture behavior, how different coagulant types set differently across pH and temperature ranges, and how to read an off make back to a likely cause in the culture-and-set stage rather than guessing at the cook or the press. If you've ever had a batch that behaved differently on a humid week with no other variable you could point to, this is usually where the answer lives.
Who it's for
This one is aimed at working cheesemakers, not people evaluating whether cheesemaking is for them — Cheese Foundations is the better starting point if you're newer to the craft. It fits well alongside Sensory Evaluation or Affinage Fundamentals if you're building toward a broader credential, but it also stands on its own for anyone who wants to stop treating the first ten minutes of a make as a checklist step.
The Valley cohort runs starting September 26; seats are limited the way most hands-on cohorts are, so if this has been on your list, this is a reasonable week to register rather than wait for the next one. Questions about fit or prerequisites can go to the Education Committee.
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.