Glebe Brethan Cheese

Glebe Brethan is a superb gruyère-style cheese, handmade by the Tiernan family in the lush grasslands of Co Louth, where David Tiernan farms the land that was farmed by his father and grandfather before him.

Named after the founder of a local monastic settlement, Glebe Brethan is an unpasteurised, thermophilic, artisan cheese made from the milk of Montbeliarde cows, a breed which originates in the mountainous of the Jura region of Eastern France, where their milk is also used to make cheese.

Made in great 45-kilo wheels and matured for up to 18 months, this magnificent cheese has won many awards, including a 2012 Irish Food Writers’ Guild Award, for “the consistent, excellent quality and complex flavour of Glebe Brethan Cheese” and a 2011 Euro-Toques Ireland Award.

It all began twenty years ago when, with a yen to make cheese, David began building up a specialist herd with two Montbeliarde cows. Now their descendants produce all the milk for Glebe Brethan cheese.

Montbeliarde are a hardy breed, powerful in appearance, yet placid in nature, and have the useful habit of searching the hedgerows for the sweetest grasses and tastiest herbs. The milk (half of which goes for liquid milk and for Bailey’s Cream Liqueur) clearly benefits from the good Louth land they graze for most of the year, and David grows wheat, barley and maize for winter feed.

As a frequent visitor to France for breeders’ meetings, David spent a day at the Mamirolle National Dairy School and, as he says himself, “caught the cheese bug”.

At once, he ordered equipment and set about converting his dairy. To acquire the skills needed to make a cheese similar to the Gruyère cheese of the Jura region, he arranged for a young cheesemaker to come to Ireland from France to teach the family.

He came for two years and provided ongoing support as they developed and test-marketed Glebe Brethan Cheese. Just two years later, in 2006, they won the award for the best new cheese at the British Cheese Awards.

And success has followed them ever since, as this wonderful cheese – which is excellent in cooking, or as a breakfast or snacking cheese, as well as starring on the best of cheeseboards - becomes better known.

But David is not only known for his unpasteurised cheese; the fact that he also makes raw milk butter and sells raw milk – and is a passionate advocate of the benefits of raw milk – has seen him at the cutting edge of the recent debate surrounding Irish government proposals to ban raw milk.

His informed contribution to the debate is one of the many reasons that the ban has not yet taken place - and, raw milk supporters hope, may not now go ahead.