Although Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade was canceled this year, that doesn’t mean we have to cancel celebrating St. Patrick’s Day! We can still enjoy our green beer and green bagels and the guy running around in a Guinness beer can costume, of course! While in a lot of ways this is a solidly American festivity, the cheese you eat on St. Patrick’s Day can be purely Irish. Ireland is known for lush, verdant land, which means they have some superior milk to make some killer cheese. In all of the Irish cheeses we have right now there is an element of richness that I think comes from those rolling green pastures. I’m highlighting a couple here, but we have others, so come by and check them all out!

Let’s start with Coolea, a gouda-style cheese made by Helene and Dick Willems in the county Cork. They moved from Holland to a small farm in Ireland in the 1970s and started making Coolea “just for fun” in 1981. Making cheese is quite hard for just being a “fun hobby”, so I’m always impressed when people start out this way. Doesn’t all this crazy hard work and difficult unpredictability deter you from such a project? But Helene and Dick once again proved that cheesemakers have heartier souls than I, and they decided to make Coolea a business in 1986. Coolea, an anglicized version their local village Cúil Aodha, is probably the nuttiest of our gouda selection. It tastes of hazelnuts, butterscotch, chocolate, bourbon, basically all the good things. If you do get a piece of this lovely creation, just promise me you’ll eat it at room temperature so you can fully enjoy all the flavors. A cold Coolea is a sad Coolea.

Now let’s turn our attention to something softer from Cooleeney Farm in Tipperary, Ireland, a county slightly more north and central than Cork. Jim and Pat Maher are the fourth generation of Mahers to run Cooleeney Farm and the slightly newer Cooleeney Cheese. Their farm sits on prime dairy land with peaty soil and clover rich grasses, making their herd of Friesian cows very happy. And as we know, happy cows + sumptuous grass = good milk = good cheese. This is clearly exhibited in their Tipperary Brie, one of the cheeses made with milk from their own herd that is a mild and creamy softie with a big hit of salted butter and a touch of wet grass. When I eat it, I get to have a moment of Irish countryside. Who doesn’t want that, I ask you??

So let’s celebrate Ireland, or at least Irish cheesemaking because it’s so dang good!

For the love of cheese and any reason eat more Irish cheese, 

Kiri