How a conversation in Aurillac became the Science of Artisan Cheese Conference

The Science of Artisan Cheese Conference 2026 took place from the 18-19th of August. This blog reflects on its beginnings and the focuses for this year. 

Adam Hendy & Maya Holding – UKHSA

Some of the best ideas start with a visit. In the years before 2012, Randolph Hodgson, then leading Neal's Yard Dairy, travelled to Aurillac, in the mountains of central France, to meet Dr Marie-Christine Montel at her INRA cheese-research institute. He came back convinced that the enlightened thinking he'd encountered there, especially around raw-milk cheese, was something British producers and regulators needed to hear firsthand and suggested bringing those scientists to the UK. Bronwen Percival, who at that point was managing the cheese buying for Neal's Yard Dairy, took the idea and ran with it, and the Science of Artisan Cheese conference was born. 

Fourteen years and eight editions later, its mission is unchanged: to get makers, scientists and regulators into one room, and to find the places where a cheesemaker's problems and science's most interesting questions turn out to be one and the same. This year it drew 98 delegates from across the UK and from the USA, Switzerland, Hungary, Spain, France and Belgium, alongside regulators from the FSA and UKHSA. It was exactly the audience the conference was built to create. 

Benjamin Wolfe – Tufts University

The setting helps. Since the beginning, Jamie Montgomery has generously offered his family's Somerset house, since renovated into North Cadbury Court: grand yet relaxed, a sort of Downton Abbey of cheese, with rooms for speakers and many delegates on site (and home, of course, to Montgomery's Cheddar and Ogleshield). 

Cadbury Court, family house of Somerset Cheddar makers the Montgomery's, and venue for the Science of Artisan Cheese Conference. 

The conference is co-sponsored by the Specialist Cheesemakers Association, which Randolph helped found in the early 1990s and whose technical committee Bronwen now chairs. Neal's Yard Dairy and the SCA share a mission: to defend British small-scale, artisan and especially raw milk cheesemaking, and to work proactively with regulators to support and normalise it. The conference feeds directly into that goal. 

This year's theme was how knowledge in our craft is made, held and passed on. Polly Russell of the British Library set it out in her keynote: which food knowledge archives venerate, and which they lose, above all the difficulty of preserving the embodied knowing that lives in a maker's hands and judgement. Fittingly, Jemima Hodgson picked the theme up in her presentation, sharing how sixteen years of patient experimentation at her farm has helped her begin to recover that lost know-how, and letting delegates taste four of her remarkable experimental cheeses. 

Polly Russell – The British Library

We shared some of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s own work, too: last year’s Cheddar workshop asking what Cheddaring itself does to the finished cheese, with a live sensory survey of makers' samples (results to follow in a future post!). And there was plenty where science meets popular culture: Sabrina Longley on cheese and the gut microbiome, and Cambridge's Giles Yeo on cheese in a post-Ozempic world. As GLP-1 drugs reshape appetite and big food scrambles to respond, he sees a real opening for artisan makers: a little exceptional cheese delivers a sensory hit that rewards quality over sheer volume. It was a case the dinner cheeseboard, by his own account, made rather well. 

Molly Browne from Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, hosting a Cheese Sensory Analysis workshop.

Food ran through all of it. In recent years Westcombe Dairy has hosted a Monday-night dinner, with brilliant pizza from partner business Landrace and beer from its resident brewery, Woodshedding; this year Landrace catered the whole two days, everything locally sourced, alongside the cheeses made by many of those in the room. 

Lunch from Landrace.

One last goal matters as much as the rest: opening the knowledge up. All the presentations from this year and previous conferences alike (the slides, and much of the audio) are free to stream and download on the conference website. We hope you'll explore them, and we look forward to welcoming the next edition in 2028. 

Attendees of the Cheddar Sensory workshop presentation.