New Announcement for Frequent Cheeser 

We are making a slight change to our Frequent Cheeser program. Customers with qualifying purchases over the past six months will be receiving a $5 gift certificate on any purchase over $10, for use immediately.

We will now be recording the total dollar amount of your purchase, and customers reaching $100 in purchases will receive a $10 gift card.

In addition, a number of our customers have reached what we call our Spreader level. We so appreciate how regularly our “Spreader” customers have supported us in these first three years! You will receive (if you haven’t already), a number of 10% discount coupons to pass to your family and friends. When they return their coupon to use in our store, we record it on your card. When all the coupons are returned, we will have a $20 gift card waiting for you.

As always, the 2^nd Saturday of the month is our Brick Street Market Rewards Day, and all Frequent Cheesers and Spreaders shop with an additional 10% discount storewide!

Again, we want to thank you for your support!

Laura Jacobs-Welch

Jennell Richardson

For shipping outside immediate Central Midwest region from May 1 – Oct 1 overnight or 2-day shipping only. Call store for rates. (262) 740-1880

In addition to Christmas, and Birthdays, these make great gifts for:
Weddings
Anniversaries

I am the face of downtown Delavan, and of entrepreneurship in America. I opened my business 2 years ago in the historic blocks of downtown. I started my career working in banking, 5 days a week and having my weekends off. You can stop in any time for my full story, but my path was always leading me to the July 4 2008 date on which I opened my business here. What I have found to be true since I opened is that my initial desire to join your other downtown business members in their small club has proven to be one of camaderie, friendship, and a daily joy at meeting each customer who choses to honor us with their choice to purchase services or goods at our stores. Local Store owners are committed to your community!

We know that you have many choices for where to spend your family dollar. Do you know how much positive impact you truly have in the success of your local independent business owner? I became aware of a not- for- profit organization earlier this year that puts this all in perspective. The organization is the 350project.net, and you can look them up online. You may have heard of this endeavor as they have received some national press. It is an organization begun by a former retailer consultant, Cinda Baxter. She has worked very hard to find successful strategies for indepenent businesses. Here are some interesting numbers I found on their website:
If half the employed population in the U.S. spent just $50 each month in 3 independent businesses (that’s only $16 per month in each of the 3, folks), $42.6 billion in revenues would be generated. By spending that money in a locally owned business, you will see $68 of every $100 stay in your community. If you spend your dollars in a national chain, just $43 stays in your community, and if you spend it online, none of that money stays in your community. I realize it is not realistic to expect our modern population to completely forgo buying online, or looking for the best deals to be had at that big box store. I am only asking that you consider saving out $50 each month and spreading it around to your local independent retailers! We need you and your beautiful downtown district needs you in order to stay vibrant, attractive, and alive!

Laura Jacobs-Welch, owner
Brick Street Market

Well, anyway, here this week’s cheese ‘tail’:

We all have those weeks that start out normal, you know, just the same old stuff:Monday getting back in to the swing, looking forward, but a bit tired, but customers begin to show up and pretty soon you just get caught up in the routine.

Tuesday – Emergency trip to Milwaukee to pick up things we’re running low on. Thank God Jennell is so capable! (Well, some lunches and cheese sales to people out enjoying the weather), even though it’s very difficult to think Thanksgiving and Christmas with the weather like this, we are figuring out our holiday window decorations.

And, then BAM – Wednesday brings what appears to be a major crisis! Controller malfunction in the walk-in – temperatures reading 10 degrees when I arrive! Okay, flurries of phone calls, waiting on a couple customer at the same time. (Get Jennell in early to help sort everything out) check with the experts, postpone this and that, do some more research, check everything 14 times, documenting all the product, finding out it has been getting colder and I hadn’t been paying close enough attention (even though we log temps every three hours on each of the deli cases)! Sometimes you just start seeing numbers and forget to make meaning! Another lesson learned!

Ok, take a breath, begin to realize we will probably be able to salvage all but the fragile and fresh fruit, vegies, etc. Well, I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought. Maybe the losses won’t be so bad. Pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, hitch up my girdle and walk on, as someone’s grandma used to say!
Thursday – consulting with Jennell, tasting cheese and checking textures after yesterday’s mechanical failure. And while we’re at it, better start thinking about open houses, getting our cheeses lined up for Christmas shipping, find just the right boxes for shipments. Making a list for the holidays, checking it twice! Ruth McBride and her son, Bill McBride of Lake Geneva, join us for lunch for her 94th birthday.

Doesn’t she look lovely? We love these types of occasions! Thanks for sharing your day with us!
And for telling us of the next BAM – this time a good BAM – the Janesville Gazette gives us outstanding 5 – plate rating in all three areas of Food, Service, and Value (kind of like a star rating for fine restaurants. You can find it in the Kicks Section of the Thursday Gazette. Thanks to Tracy Douglas for the nice thoughts. )! What a bonus! And as much as I’d like to take credit, I couldn’t do it without Jennell’s finely tuned and very enthusiastic palate. She takes my suggestions in stride, we try things out, she tweaks it and makes a beautiful presentation out of it! The customers seem to love it!

The local florist stops in and asks when we’d like to be put on the schedule for holiday boughs, i put them off until after Thanksgiving. I’m afraid with the extreme warm weather, if the boughs go up now, all we’ll have is pine needle dust by Christmas!

A very busy weekend, with a special benefit event for the Lakeland Animal Shelter here in Walworth County, so prep on Friday for cheese trays and gift boxes to be picked up! Looking ahead to next week with 2 big events (a wine dinner at Kirsch’s French Country Inn, the Delavan Scholarship Foundation Benefit, and the Downtown Holiday Walk! Better go and print out a couple more planning sheets for the ‘week of’!
You can just feel the excitement as the season is starting to kick into gear! I hope you come in to say hi the next time you’re in Delavan!
Laura

Okay, I understand all about the ‘terroir’ thing – a cheese of a certain origin being matched with a great libation from the same region. But, sometimes, a great friend can live in a completely different place from you. We found that this past week when we sampled Holland Farms Smoked Gouda with a wine from France called Corbieres Col de Vent ( french for neck of wind). This particular wine is a blend of Syrah, Grenache and Carignan grapes. The Carignan grape varietal was the feature of this month’s Saveur magazine Special Feature, in a review by David Rosengarten. It comes to us from the south of France, just 60 miles north of the Spanish border in the Languedoc-Roussillon region.

I find it most helpful to smell the wine first. This helps me to identify some of the components before I coat the inside of my mouth with either cheese or a myriad of elements of the wine. The wine by itself is blueberry and raspberry fruit-y from the beginning, and is a medium easy drinking red wine with just hints of spiciness and black pepper. I found the wine to almost have a watery finish – but when paired with the smoked gouda, the spiciness and black pepper enhance and lengthen the effect of the natural smoke flavor!

A number of our customers were pleasantly surprised with the pairing, and took home this bottle of wine with a small piece of the beautiful cheese. Congratulations to Holland Farms Marieke & Rolf and to the Castlemaure folks for a delightful pairing!

Corbieres Col des Vent – $12.00 – 10% off all week at Brick Street Market!

I came back from Seattle with my brain ‘a point’ as the French say of their cheese. I was like that bit of brie that, when left out at room temperature, gently oozes itself out of its rind! So much information, it’s taken me the better part of the last week and a half trying to sort through it all. Still glowing from the experience though, so I thought I’d share just a bit more before closing the chapter.

We attended some great classes with our own ‘industry notables’, like Ari Weinzweig from Zingerman’s Delicatessan in Ann Arbor Michigan; and Greg O’Neill of Pastoral in Chicago. We listened to moderated panels on logical line extensions – how to best add things that might please our customers. Or, why is customer service so important that everyone speaks the talk, and only a small portion of businesses actually walk the walk and how we can walk it. I know, it sounds very technical – but I look forward to implementing things in small ways at Brick Street Market that will help us stick around over the long term.

After Friday and Saturday’s similar routine to our first day (read previous blog of 8/30/10), and beautiful receptions at the Seattle Acquarium and at the Seattle Visitor’s Bureau and Convention Center – oh yes, marvelous food and cheese was present for all), my sister Shelly was really anticipating our closing speaker, Michael Pollan, and what he might be able to tell an industry that has been promoting eating ‘real’ food for all of its 27 years of existence. (The ingredients label on most artisan cheeses has, in many instances only 3-4 ingredients. Email me the top three ingredients, and I will send you a $5 gift certificate!) Polland didn’t so much give us new information, (his books are well know in most circles) as he did confirm what the majority of these conference goers have been living day to day.

After taking to the stage and promptly calling cheesemongers “Masters of Rot” – (you’d think we’d all be highly offended, but not this group!) We laughed heartily, and the new moniker made it into the press that very day! Words to remember:

You are what you eat and what you eat eats!

We retreated to our hotel room to prepare for the Award Ceremony, then everyone gathered at the Benaroya Hall (home of the Seattle Symphony), for announcements and Festival of Cheese, the much awaited culmination of a year’s hard work for many cheesemakers. Many amazingly good cheeses were recognized that night, but the best was when BEST IN SHOW was announced: Upland Cheese’s Pleasant Ridge Reserve!

The Festival of Cheeses was just over the top. Fourteen hundred plus cheese displayed for the adoring public!
And the pronouncement of Pleasant Ridge Reserve as the Winner of the Best in Show title proved that MIke Gingrich has truly passed the torch to the newest “Cheeseman” has arrived! Congratulations to the Patenaude and Gingrich families, and to Andy Hatch!

Memo: To all my ‘cheese – y’ friends in Delavan – I’M HOME! AND … contrary to my earlier assertion, my head did not explode.

However I am putting myself on a low-cheese diet this week. Whew, what a marathon!

So we arrived on Wednesday, and girded our loins, only eating a light dinner of … wait for it –

Macaroni & Cheese at Beecher’s Cheese!

Thursday brought us face to face with breakfast and cheese platters at each table sponsored by the Vermont Cheesemakers. Then we were entertained by an opening presentation on the topic of Consumers: What’s going on in your minds? We learned of trends, lifestyles, and what we might expect from you, our customers in the coming year. I’ll let you know how you make out.

This presentation concluded, and the doors opened and the crowd flowed out to be faced with a networking and cheese sampling sponsored by Forever Cheese! Taste, Taste, talk, talk, talk. Then on to the next session.

Cheesemakers went to cheesemaking panels, retailers (myself) went to retailer panels, distributors … well, you get the picture. And then, it was LUNCH TIME! And, you guessed it, more cheese – this time sponsored by distributor Zuercher & Sons, of Chicago.

The afternoon arrived with very relevant topics like Marketing in the age of Twitter, or American Cheese and Beer Pairing! And then, again break out sessions for more talk, talk, talk, and taste, taste, taste – this time sponsored by Belgioso Cheese from Denmark WI. My favorite there? The burrata scooped onto a small scoop – y leaf of romaine lettuce. Burrata is a wonderful ovaline of mozzarella with gooshy, squishy mozzerella curdiness inside! When you cut it open, it just flows out! Wow that was good!

Another round of panel discussions like “How to taste cheese” (?!! – Really!) and then it was on to a Meet The Cheesemaker Event – with, you guessed it, more cheese! Woo Hoo!

I loved this because I got to meet Marieke and Rolf Pentermann, of Chilton, WI – the makers of Marieke Goudas! Unless you haven’t been in a cheese store in WI, you will probably have experienced any number of their sublimely delicious goudas! Life is full of ironies as you well know, and it hasn’t escaped me that I met Marieke and Rolf for the first time – not in our home state, but in Seattle, WA. The universe is a funny place folks!

Anyway, that pretty much finished up our first big day! Stay tuned this week for further tales of ‘cheese-ing’ !

Next – the Cheeseman cometh!
Laura

Laura

Milk and cheese
Cows’ milk contains the sugar lactose – the least cariogenic (decay-causing) sugar. Milk on its own doesn’t promote caries and this has been attributed to the presence of protective factors: calcium, phosphate, and the milk protein casein.

Cheese protects against dental caries, partly because eating cheese causes more saliva to flow and neutralise acids, and partly because the cheese increases calcium concentration in the plaque stopping demineralisation. The fat in cheese also reduces the amount of bacteria on the surface of the teeth. So a small lump of cheese eaten after a meal or a sugary/acidic drink will help protect tooth enamel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/treatments/healthy_living/nutrition/dietary_dental.shtm

If you are looking for something unique, we have a wine tasting this weekend with Beth Moyer on Saturday from 1 until 3 p.m. As always, I will have the cheese picked to match Beth’s Summer Wine selection, and we’ll have great fun! Join us and be entered into a drawing for a BSM Gift Certificate! Free and open to all!

It’s time to relax, to take a deep breath, to move your living out of doors. Many might think that summer is not the time for cheese – it’s heavy, it’s thick on the palate, it doesn’t match up well with all those light summer foods!
Here are some examples of how well our cheeses really do match up to your lighter summer fare:

A light appetizer tray featuring these 3 cheeses is a guaranteed hit:

1. Menage by Carr Valley – a lovely blend of three milks (cow, goat, sheep) matured into a light and elegant, yet creamy white cheese, paired with a crisp, chilled Sauvignon Blanc or our new Basa. This would be a standout on a tray featuring fresh pop-in-your mouth blueberries or strawberries, and a great crisp cracker like Madison – made Potters crackers.

2. Now add a savory or flavored cheese like Hook’s Sundried Tomato Basil Cheddar or Holland Farms Gouda with Foenegreek. Either of these would be perfect companions with a thin sliced Molinari Sliced Salami. Pair this with a summer red like a Tempranillo or a Zinfandel.

3. A third could be the elegant and creamy Buttermilk Blue from Roth Kase, and a top favorite here at BSM. Let this cheese warm to room temperature and spread on crackers (Potter’s Hazelnut Graham) and drizzle with a local honey, like Wisconsin’s Natural Acres raw honey!

Bring on the grill, bring on the cheese!
Laura