How America’s Best Cheese Is Made on a Wisconsin Family Farm

Uplands Cheese’s award-winning wheels start with a single herd of cows, acres of fresh pasture, and the dedication of two families carrying on a legacy.

Uplands Cheese has won national cheese awards. In the fall, when the cows switch from fresh grass to hay, the creamery uses the cows' richer, fattier milk to make its Rush Creek Reserve cheese. Kevin J. Miyazaki

If you’re a serious fan of American artisanal cheese, you’ve likely eaten, or at least heard of, Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Uplands Cheese. This hard, alpine-style cheese is made from raw milk from cows that eat only spring and summer grasses from a single farm’s pristine fields. The cheese is then washed in brine and aged for at least nine months (and as long as two years for the Extra-Aged selection).

It has quite the resume: Best of Show in the American Cheese Society (ACS) annual competition three times (2001, 2005, and 2010), and Champion at the 2003 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest—the only cheese to ever win both national awards.