By Gordon Edgar –
When you have worked as a monger for a long time, you can see a long trajectory in certain cheeses. At first, no one knows their name and you have to suggest it over-and-over, offering samples and telling the story. Then—if it’s a good cheese—it develops a following and it sells itself. Your mongering efforts can go to other cheeses that need support because you cannot count on the fact that an appropriate number of pounds or wheels will just fly out the door on the momentum already built through the loyalty of their fans.
Sometimes, there is another cycle. Especially if a cheese is local, it may even get a little oversaturated: on so many restaurant menus and cheese boards that cheese eaters may start finding it too obvious or ubiquitous to serve to friends. That’s when mongers need to step in again.
We promoted Cowgirl Creamery’s Mt Tam last month and this month are reminding people how good it is. For us, it started with a phone call. Cowgirl had a little too much on hand and asked if we could take a large amount for a good discount. We accepted and sold our first twenty cases so fast (at $9.99/each for 7 oz., regularly 16.99/each) that two days later I called and asked for more. Then, a week later, I asked how long we could keep going. The answer I got was, “Until November,” when the food holidays would require them to spread the cheese around.
Mt. Tam is a triple cream, soft ripened cheese. “Triple cream” means that extra cream is added to the extent that the next step on the scale of fatty dairy products is butter. Soft-ripened is the cheese category that “brie” falls under, though Mt. Tam is distinctively firmer than many other styles.
For years, Mt Tam was our #1 American artisan cheese in terms of sales (if not weight). The original founders Sue Conley and Peg Smith retired from the company a few years back and sold it to Emmi, a Swiss cheese company that has been buying up American artisan cheese companies as their owners retire. I think Mt. Tam lost some fans along the way, such as when Emmi closed the Ferry Building store and the Point Reyes cheese plant. There were times over the last few years when the cheese suffered a little for various reasons, as happens with cheese sometimes.
Mt. Tam, however, is still a locally-produced cheese from local organic milk and, honestly, it is back to tasting as good as it ever has. It’s rich, buttery, luscious, and grassy. It’s a great dessert cheese with bubbly drinks and it makes a great decadent sandwich if you are into that kind of thing. It has a relatively firm texture for its style—it’s still a soft cheese, just not an oozy one—which gives it more versatility and more opportunities for creativity in your use of it.
Our $9.99 sale will only last through October, so come on down and remind yourself how good Mt Tam really is. It deserves its reputation as a local treasure.
Gordon Edgar loves cheese and worker co-ops and has been combining these infatuations as the cheese buyer for Rainbow Grocery Cooperative since 1994. He serves on the American Cheese Society Judging and Competition Committee and is a member of the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers. Edgar has written two books on cheese—”Cheesemonger” (2010) and “Cheddar” (2015)—and lives in San Francisco with his adorable white mini schnauzer named Fillmore Grumble. He writes about grief, and sometimes cheese, at https://bit.ly/42IwYf0
Over the Rainbow Cheese Counter
Published on October 9, 2025
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