Coolea

This cheese is made on a small farm in Coolea in the beautiful Derrynasaggart Mountains of County Cork, but the inspiration for its style can be found in the much flatter terrain of the Netherlands. Dick and Helene Willems moved to Ireland from their native Holland in the late 1970s, and the cheese they produce from the pasteurised milk of a local herd of Holstein-Friesian cows mirrors a traditional Dutch Gouda make: the curds scalded and washed to remove some of the lactose and reduce the acidity, pressed for around six hours, then brushed by hand with yellow coating before being matured for at least three months and often much longer.

We've been buying Coolea from the Willems family since the 1980s, and we export their cheese all over the world. We visit them twice a year on our trips to Ireland and have supported them in extending their maturing store to allow the cheese to be matured for longer. The milk they use is from a farm that is close by and the quality of milk is best between April and September. The cheese that we sell is matured for at least a year and often longer.