Jasper Hill Farm

So here's the thing about Jasper Hill Farm-it's basically what happens when two brothers decide to completely revolutionize American cheesemaking, and somehow pull it off. Brothers Andy and Mateo, along with their wives, Victoria and Angie, pooled their life savings and bought a rocky hillside farm in Vermont's subarctic climate zone near the Canadian border. This wasn't some romantic farm fantasy either. The old dairy barn they found themselves with hadn't seen cows for nearly 40 years. About a third of the farms in town sold their cows in 1998; the same year that the Kehlers bought what locals referred to as "the old Jasper Hill farm."

But here's where it gets interesting. Their cheeses are ripened at The Cellars at Jasper Hill, their 22,000 square-foot underground cave-aging system. And we're not talking about some rustic basement setup-this is a legitimate underground facility with seven different vaults, each calibrated for specific cheese types. It's like the Fort Knox of cheese aging.

The breakthrough came when Cabot Creamery called them up. In 2003, Jasper Hill was approached by Cabot Creamery to collaborate on aging a natural-rind clothbound cheddar, which became known as Cabot Clothbound Cheddar. In 2006 this cheese won Best of Show at the American Cheese Society conference. That's when they realized they weren't just making cheese-they were creating infrastructure for an entire regional cheese industry.

Their two creameries produce a total of fourteen distinct kinds of cheese in addition to regularly developing new R&D projects and special-release cheeses. But what really sets them apart is their business model. Their model focuses on value-added agriculture that allows them to pay partner farms three times what they'd make on commodity markets. They're not just making award-winning cheese; they're literally keeping Vermont's dairy farming tradition alive.

And the awards keep coming. In 2013, Winnimere won Best of Show at the annual American Cheese Society conference. In February 2014, Bayley Hazen Blue was served at the White House state dinner for visiting French President François Hollande. When your cheese is good enough for international diplomacy, you know you're doing something right.