Cheese requires a cave.

[Brian Roebuck]

The switch from American processed cheese food to small-batch artisanal goat cheese was fast. And now the American appetite ---- ever-hungry for something new ---- is changing again.

Hand-crafted and small-batch simply aren't enough anymore. To have curd cachet now requires a cave.

A tremendous focus now is being given to the aging of cheeses, and high-tech caves where that can happen are starting to show up around the country.

Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vt., for example, recently opened an ultramodern 22,000-square-foot aging cellar that is the buzz of the cheese world.

www.nctimes.com/articles/2008/03/27/food/31c736b11b52074888257413007c43fd.txt

[Azurerana]

Here's a blue cheese cave in Minnesota.

www.faribaultdairy.com/cheesecaves.html

Unfortunately, their geology is wrong. They say the St. Peter is the beach sand from the last glacial age. Well, only if the last glaciers retreated from Minnesota 440 million years ago.

[jonsdigs]

Their cheeses are delicious! I remember the "caves" dug out of the St. Peter Sandstone in the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi when I lived in the Twin Cities. There even was a speakeasy in one during prohibition. On this note I am amused that the Tennessee pot cave, a modern naughty along the same line of prohibited substances, was bought by a high-tech small cheese making company.

A natural cave physically washed out of the St. Peter was dug into under Minneapolis when they were digging power diversion tunnels around St. Anthony's Falls.

Pardon my nerding out but you are right Az, the St. Peter Sandstone was quarried for its high purity along the Fox and Illinois Rivers in Illinois where I grew up. It represents the last beaches as that part the of the country was inundated by an ocean a little less than half a billion years ago in the Ordovician. It is capped by the Ordovician Galena-Platteville Limestones. The ocean then stayed around until the swamps of the coal age.

[Azurerana]

We have massive sand mines in the St. Pete here in Pacific. About 99.5% silica.. very little iron, and what there is, is green. They always told me that was because it was laid down in a reducing atmosphere.

Now...if you wanted to see something silly-- they sandbagged the sand mine last week. We had oceans much more recently than the Ordovician-- Silurian, Devonian, Mississippian, and even Pennsylvanian, though the Pennsy wasn't that deep, with 20-24 advances and retreats, but with some deep enough to lay down thin limestone.

Hey, I love it...its a rock a middle aged woman can crush in her bare hands!
But I don't like blue cheese. Ick.