Mill Spring Monday: Looking Glass creamery

🧀 Mill Spring Monday: Looking Glass Creamery

If you haven't been to Looking Glass Creamery yet, this week just gave you two excellent reasons to go.

First: Seven brand new calves arrived this week, kicking off calving season on the farm. Every February, the herd takes a coordinated break from milking, the calves start being born, and the whole cycle of farmstead cheesemaking begins again. It's one of the rhythms that makes Looking Glass Creamery different — they're a seasonal producer, which means they stop making cheese in November, let the herd rest, and come back in February when the grass is green and the babies arrive.

Second: Looking Glass just won Tourism & Hospitality Business of the Year from the Carolina Foothills Chamber of Commerce. The recognition went to the crew who show up every day to milk cows, make award-winning cheese, run the farm store, and represent the farm at the Landrum Farmers Market every Saturday.

Started by Jennifer and Andy Perkins in 2009, Looking Glass has grown from a tiny operation in Fairview into a 226-acre working dairy farm in Columbus — one of the largest farms in Polk County still in agriculture. They bought the farm in 2017 and built a new creamery with underground aging cellars carved into the hillside where you can peek through windows and watch wheels of cheese aging away.

Everything they make — cheese, hard cider, preserves, ice cream — comes from what they produce on the farm. Their Drovers Road cheddar won a bronze medal at the World Championship Cheese Competition. Williams-Sonoma featured their cheese collection for years. And if you visit, you can take a self-guided tour, see the production floor, meet a cow, walk the trails, and stay for a cheeseboard with hard cider on tap.

Coming soon: expanded farm store hours in late spring, and if the sunshine and rain cooperate, a wildflower walk this spring and u-pick sunflowers pushed to early fall.

The farm store is open Thursday–Saturday 11am–5pm, Sunday noon–5pm at 115 Harmon Dairy Lane in Columbus. Well-behaved dogs on leash are welcome outside.

🧀 More at www.ashevillecheese.com

Know a Mill Spring business that deserves a spotlight? Send me a message.