Colby cheese gets cold shoulder from lawmakers, but no one can diminish this Wisconsin original

Editor's note: This story has been changed to reflect the correct employment status of Dr. Don Crego Jr., who is a practicing dentist in Theresa.

True fans of Colby cheese are bound to be disappointed with Madison politicians this year: There's lukewarm support, at best, among lawmakers to make it the official Wisconsin State Cheese.

Lukewarm is the perfect temperature for making Colby cheese, but it's very bad for passing legislation. State Sen. Kathy Bernier of Lake Hallie and Rep. Donna Rozar of Marshfield, both Republicans who represent Colby in Madison, introduced a bill to make Colby the state cheese on April 6. 

This was only a day after a column I wrote was published about how Colby should be officially recognized by our state's elected officials. But even if it isn't designated as such, Colby is the state cheese, no matter what politicians do.

Some people might be surprised to learn that Wisconsin doesn't even have a state cheese. Instead, cheese as a whole is the official dairy product of the state. For a lot of us, that's as bland as skim milk.

I might be biased because I grew up in Colby, where Joseph F. Steinwand developed Colby cheese in his father's factory southwest of town in 1885. But the truth is that Colby cheese was a sensation, and demand for the product created a new commercial market and helped Wisconsin become the top producer of cheese in country in 1910. It's been on top ever since.

The column and the bill's introduction were uncoordinated. I didn't speak to Rozar or Bernier before the piece ran, nor did I have any idea what they had planned. It was entirely a coincidence. 

"No it wasn't," Rozar insisted to me when I spoke to her a couple days after the bill was introduced and the column ran. "It was fortuitous."

Maybe she thought that the column/bill introduction was a sort of sign, an alignment of cosmic energy that would propel the bill into law and Colby cheese onto its rightful place in Wisconsin history.

Alas, it doesn't seem to be. Last week, Bernier said it would be unlikely that the bill would get the traction it needed to be passed.

"Reality is what it is," she said. "I had high hopes, but I was focused on this budget and election laws."

OK, that makes sense. But since Colby cheese basically is Wisconsin in food form, shouldn't it still be easy to make it official?

Nope. There's a reason some people oppose the measure, Bernier said.

"Wisconsin is known for all our cheeses," she said.

And the Big Cheeses of the Wisconsin cheese industry are loath to elevate any kind of of cheese so as not to erode the standings (and, I'm guessing, the sales) of the other forms of cheese. 

"That's our stumbling block," Bernier said.

It's proven to be a formidable barrier, even though the effort to make Colby the Wisconsin cheese "isn't intended to insult other cheesemakers," Bernier said. "It's just a way to honor the cheese that put Wisconsin on the map."

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'Often, he was called a "crab"'

After writing the initial column, I started to get obsessed with the Colby cheese origin story and I wanted to learn more. As I've reached out to various sources, found old articles and made contacts with the Wisconsin Historical Society, I've found out that the story is very rich, indeed.

The Colby cheese tale goes like this. In 1885 a young cheesemaker named Joseph Steinwand developed Colby cheese by modifying the cheddar making process. He rinsed curds with cold water and did not remove excess moisture and whey as cheesemakers do with cheddar. This created a moist, crumbly, creamy cheese that, done right, squeaks on your teeth like curds and nearly melts in your mouth.

There are various versions of the origin story. One version has Steinwand developing the new Colby cheese by mistake, after making an error in a batch of cheddar. I like this one for a variety of reasons, mostly because I can relate to a young guy bumbling a job.

But other versions paint a very different picture. One account had Steinwand taking a cheesemaking course in Madison, giving him the expertise to very intentionally create a new genre of cheese. Still others had him learning the Colby cheesemaking process from another cheesemaker altogether.

My sense is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle of all these accounts. What is true, at least according to a profile of Steinwand that ran on Dec. 24, 1935, in the Special Weekly Farm Section of the Wausau Daily Record-Herald, was that Steinwand was an exacting, fussy cheesemaker who sometimes ruffled feathers to produce the best cheese he could.

"Visitors to the factory were never allowed to smoke. If they stood in the doorway, they were promptly invited to come in or step out in order that the screen door would not remain open. A mat was at the door for use in removing mud from shoes or rubbers and when this did not serve the purpose, Steinwand quickly spoke up as he kept his floor and factory scrupulously clean," according to the story.

"Often he was called a 'crab,' but Steinwand was Steinwand and he was proud of that! After all, folks knew it was not quantity but quality in which he was interested ..."

Hmm. Seems like that's something that Wisconsin leaders and cheese producers might want to highlight and celebrate, right?

'Colby cheese is perfect!'

My original Colby column seemed to touch a lot of people who had some sort of connection to Colby the town, Steinwand or Colby the cheese. I started getting emails and phone calls from across the state and beyond. 

One of those who responded was Peggy Zimdars, who read the story in the Door County Advocate. Her grandfather, Walter Rindfleisch, owned the Steinwand cheese factory, which had been named Colby Cloverdale Cheese Factory, from 1952 to 1961.

"I have happy memories of the factory as a little girl," Zimdars wrote. "Cheese curds aren't the same unless they are straight from the vat! And you are right, Colby cheese is perfect!"

She suggested that I call Dale Rindfleisch, her uncle and Walter's son, who worked in the factory as a teen and young man. 

Dale Rindfleisch is 89 years old now and lives in the town of Mayville. He had to give up cheesemaking early on because of the physical toll it took on his body.

"It was tearing up my feet," he said.

He went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and became a math teacher. 

"I don't think anybody realizes how much energy and strength it takes to run a cheese factory," Dale said.

He talked about how different Colby cheese was from cheddar. They start out similarly, but then cheddar cheese is stacked and drained of whey. The end result is a lot drier, denser cheese, and it can be aged because of lack of moisture. 

Once, Dale remembers, he and his fellow workers forgot a block of cheddar at the factory, and found it about three years later. "Oh was that cheese ever good," Dale said. "We couldn't sell it, so we kept it and ate it, just for the family."

Colby cheese can't be aged that way. "It's not a keeper," Dale said. "After two, three, four months at most, it will grow moldy."

By the way, Dale believes that Colby cheese was developed by "accident, I recall. They didn't get the cheese matted down (to drain) and discovered Colby cheese."

And for the record, he supports the notion of making Colby cheese the state cheese. "To me it doesn't seem to be any hardship to make it the state cheese," he said.

'They hurt an American original'

In mid-May I received an email from Dr. Don Crego Jr, a dentist who has worked for 47 years in Theresa, a little town located east of the Horicon National Wildlife Refuge.

Theresa is the home of Widmer's Cheese Cellars. "They make a great Colby and I have not tasted one as good and we have all tried," Crego wrote in an email. 

Widmer's is a special place, a four-generation cheese-making business that clings to traditional ways of making cheese. It produces an award-winning Colby cheese, but it specializes in creating brick cheese using techniques that are more than a 100 years old.

One of the reasons that Crego, and really anyone who has a discerning Colby cheese palate, has trouble finding really good Colby cheese, is because modern producers, particularly large producers, transformed the way of making Colby in the 1980s. Changes in laws allowed producers to make a form of Colby that wasn't as crumbly as traditional Colby, closer to a mild cheddar.

Joe Widmer, who owns Widmer's, bemoaned the change in a book called "The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin."

Large cheesemakers "started making mild cheddar and calling it colby. They're two different cheeses, but the USDA sided with them (the makers), and changed the definition of colby," Widmer said in the book. "They hurt an American original by doing that, because it's not an original cheese anymore. We still make an original one."

This explains why, much to my chagrin, most Colby cheese that I buy at stores doesn't taste like the cheese I remember getting as a kid. Now, if I'm going to get Colby cheese, I go to Hawkeye Dairy Store in Abbotsford. It's the nearest place I can find that I can get the "good" Colby.

Crego said he and his wife once journeyed to Colby to get some cheese. They were disappointed that they could find no place to buy some in my hometown. They did get some at Hawkeye, but Crego said he thinks Widmer's Colby cheese is even better. 

It looks like I'll be heading to Theresa first chance I get.