What’s significant about this? Well, Schneider’s adding only small amounts of starter bacteria to the milk, which means a slower acidification process (souring, the first stage of cheesemaking). This builds more complex flavors, but it also takes more time, so big dairies often skip this step.

Hand-ladling, too, is time-intensive (not to mention back-breaking!). It involves transferring a bunch of heavy curd with a little shovel from the vat to a cooling trolley at a specific time in the cheesemaking process. The benefit, however, of hand-ladling is that it keeps the very delicate curd from being treated as roughly as it would be were it pumped through a pipe—and results in an exceptional lightness and creaminess in the cheese’s eventual texture.

Finally, there’s Schneider’s choice to leave the milk unpasteurized. Raw milk’s small renaissance, much ballyhooed of late, joins an existing dialogue about raw-milk cheese, which tends, at least in my opinion, to be tastier, more nutritious, and less industrially made than pasteurized cheese. An interesting twist in the story is the fact that according to British PDO rules, written in 1990 by the (mostly large) Stilton factories in order to protect the "traditions" shrouding their hallowed product, Stilton cheese can't be called Stilton cheese unless it’s pasteurized! (PDO means “Product of Designated Origin,” and is the British version of the French AOC.) So Schneider’s calling his cheese Stichelton, an older name for Stilton, and waiting for the firestorm over this hypocrisy that's sure to erupt once the British media get wind of the story.

No one's made Stilton this painstakingly in decades. The first wheels of the cheese are just starting to come to America, and by Christmastime they’ll be in prime spots on the better cheese counters in New York City and in Europe. It’s delicious—toasty, nutty, savory, sweet—and will only get better as Schneider gets to know the cheese.