Black Sheep Creamery

The company: Black Sheep Creamery, sheep’s-milk cheese producer, near Chehalis, Washington.

The people: Brad and Meg Gregory. He’s a former mechanical engineer, she’s trained in nursing and nutrition, so building and operating a sheep creamery is the perfect convergence of their skills, though if you’d told them that 20 years ago, they wouldn’t have believed you.

Why we picked them: Their award-winning cheeses speak for themselves, once you taste them, but we also were captivated by Black Sheep’s story, which began when one of their three sons couldn’t drink cow’s milk, so the Gregory’s bought a few ewes to milk. The herd grew, they soon had a lot of milk, and eventually their experiments with cheesemaking became their passion. They now make a half-dozen cheese styles with milk from their own flocks of East Freisian, Rideau-Arcott, and Lacuane sheep, as well as milk from Tin Willow farm in Oregon.