5th Annual Seattle Cheese Festival, May 16-17, 2009 at Pike Place Market

 

The 5th Annual Seattle Cheese Festival takes place Saturday and Sunday, May 16-17, along the cobblestone street of Pike Place Market.

The Seattle Cheese Festival offers the general public the opportunity to taste, celebrate, and learn more about artisanal cheese. Come taste more than 200 cheeses from local and international producers.

The event schedule includes fresh mozzarella making demos, wine tasting, and educational seminars, and of course, the opportunity to walk along the cheese concourse sampling dozens of cheeses! The Cheese Concourse will begin with a $1 suggested donation, with proceeds going towards the Seattle Cheese Festival Scholarship Fund.

There is plenty of parking at the Market Parking Garage.

The following local cheesemakers will exhibit at the festival and can also be found at local farmers markets throughout Seattle.

Estrella Family Creamery
Estrella Family Creamery’s is a family owned and operated grass-based dairy. Estrella makes over eighteen different types of handcrafted cow and goat milk cheeses, with seasonal variations. Estrella’s award-winning cheeses are made with raw milk from animals grazed in organically maintained pastures.

Mt. Townsend Creamery
Mt. Townsend Creamery is founded on the belief that Pacific Northwest dairy is a regional treasure. The Olympic Peninsula has a rich dairy history. Its rolling landscape and rocky soils are more suited to grazing than tilling, a tradition that the small family run dairies there have practiced for the last 150 years.

River Valley Cheese
River Valley Cheese produces raw cow and goat milk cheese, as well as a full-flavored Wild West Mozzarella, containing water buffalo, yak and cow milk. River Valley herds spend the day grazing on fresh pasture, alfalfa and blackberry thickets and are also fed spent barley recycled from Pike Brewery!

Samish Bay Cheese
Since 1999, Samish Bay Cheese has been producing organic farmstead cheese in the Skagit Valley. Samish Bay cows graze on organic grass, grain, and clover grown on the farm. Their milk is used to produce several types of organic fresh and aged cheeses.

Willapa Hills Farmstead Cheese
Willapa Hills handcrafts the highest quality all natural farmstead and artisan cheese including fresh and aged sheep milk and cow milk cheeses and several blue cheeses. Three generations of the Turnbull family are intimately involved in the daily practice and art of farming and cheese making.