Finn is a soft, cream-enriched cheese from Neal's Yard Creamery in Herefordshire, England, made by folding extra cream into the curd before it sets. That extra richness earned it a specific claim: Britain's first cream-enriched cheese in the French double- and triple-cream tradition.
The name has nothing to do with Finland or Scandinavia. Cheesemaker Charlie Westhead named it after his dog, whose name is Irish for "great white one," a fitting match for the cheese's pale, wrinkled rind.
In This Article
What Makes Finn Britain's First Cream-Enriched Cheese
Cream-enriched cheeses like Finn belong to a French tradition built around names such as Brillat-Savarin, Délice de Bourgogne, and Vignotte. Before Finn, Britain had no cheese made the same way.
Westhead was Neal's Yard Dairy's first full-time employee, hired in the 1980s to run the Covent Garden shop and travel the country selecting cheese for the retailer. In 1990 he took over the company's small cheesemaking side at Ide Hill, near Sevenoaks in Kent, "with minimal training," largely learning the craft through trial and error.
He moved the whole operation to Herefordshire in 1996, where it still runs today. Finn was his answer to the French double- and triple-cream style, built with British milk rather than an imported recipe.
Westhead now shares cheesemaking duties with head cheesemaker Haydn Roberts. The creamery itself runs on a wood burner, solar panels, and wind power, and filters its wastewater through a constructed wetland on site, a level of self-built infrastructure that matches Westhead's habit of solving problems with practical engineering rather than expensive custom equipment.
The milk comes from a named herd: New Zealand Friesian cows, with a few Jerseys mixed in, raised by Andrew and Rachel Giles at Glasbury on Wye. Jersey milk in particular carries more butterfat, which matters when the whole point of the cheese is extra richness.
The Giles family runs a New Zealand-style pastoral system rather than a conventional year-round dairy operation. Cows are milked only while grazing fresh grass, calving is timed tightly to February and March so peak milk output lines up with peak grass growth, and the farm measures its grassland weekly from February through November to keep the herd's diet consistent.
How Finn Is Made
Adding cream to curd sounds simple, but it fights the cheesemaking process at every step. Cream wants to separate out during the slow lactic set, it holds excess moisture once trapped in the curd, and it can break down faster than plain milk fat, sometimes turning soapy or bitter.
Westhead solves the separation problem by top-stirring the curd every fifteen minutes during the setting hour, right up until the rennet reaches flocculation point, the moment the milk begins turning to curd. That constant stirring keeps the cream suspended through the base of the milk instead of rising and pooling.
Finn also uses cardoon rennet, a vegetable rennet made from thistle, instead of animal rennet. That choice makes the cheese vegetarian-friendly, a detail that matters for buyers who avoid animal rennet on principle.
Westhead makes two other adjustments to keep the extra fat from breaking down into a soapy or bitter flavor. He uses a gentler, slower-working bulk starter culture instead of a more aggressive strain, and he renets the milk at a lower temperature to keep the cream from rising too fast.
He also handles the milk gently, skipping the vigorous pumping that would otherwise damage the fat structure.
Reading Finn's Rind
A young Finn shows a thin, mostly smooth white rind just beginning to wrinkle. As the cheese ages through its two-to-three-week ripening window, the rind thickens and folds more visibly, and the paste just beneath it starts to soften and bulge slightly.
A rind that looks flat, dry, or grey rather than white signals a piece that has either dried out or aged past its intended window. The interior should still look dense and pale, not collapsed.
Specialist retailers like The Courtyard Dairy sell Finn at around four weeks old, the point they consider the best balance between developed flavor and a texture that hasn't yet started to break down. Buy it younger and the flavor is still building.
Buy it much older and the paste turns looser than it should.
What Finn Tastes Like
Young Finn tastes fresh, lactic, and clean, closer to a rich cultured cream than an aged cheese. The added cream makes the texture feel dense rather than airy, coating the palate the way a good crème fraîche does.
As Finn matures toward the end of its ripening window, walnut and mushroom notes develop under the rind. The center stays milder and creamier than the edge, so a full bite gives both the ripened rind flavor and the fresher core in one taste.
That contrast between rind and center is part of the point. A well-timed Finn should let you taste the difference between the two without either one dominating.
Culture magazine has compared Finn's rich, buttery, lactic flavor to Zingerman's Creamery's Manchester cheese in Michigan, a similarly cream-enriched American original, though the two differ in pasture, milk source, and cow breed. Finding a close American reference point like that is unusual for a small British farmhouse cheese.
Double Cream or Triple Cream? What Finn's Fat Content Actually Says
French law defines a double cream as 60 to 75 percent fat in dry matter, and a triple cream as 75 percent or higher. No fat-in-dry-matter figure is published for Finn, so the label can't be checked against those thresholds directly.
The only hard number available is 30.6 grams of fat per 100 grams of whole product, which works out to roughly 30 percent fat by total weight, a bit below Brillat-Savarin's roughly 40 percent.
Neal's Yard Creamery's own site and its most established stockists call Finn a "double cream," while some retailers market it as "triple cream." Given the producer's own language and the absence of a certified fat-in-dry-matter figure, "double cream" is the safer description.
How to Serve Finn
Finn is a table cheese, not a cooking cheese. Its richness is the whole appeal, and melting it away in a hot dish wastes the reason to buy it.
Serve it at room temperature on its own plate, away from strongly flavored neighbors on a board. Plain crusty bread or simple crackers work better than anything sweet or heavily seasoned, since the cheese's richness is already doing the work.
Cut wedges from the centre outward so each piece carries both rind and paste. A ripe round is soft enough that the blade drags, and wiping the knife between cuts keeps paste off the next slice.
A 200 gram round covers four to six people alongside other cheeses. That is small enough to finish at one table, which is how a cheese this rich does best.
What to Drink With Finn
A dry sparkling wine cuts through the cream without fighting it, and Champagne in particular is a classic match for cream-enriched cheeses in general. A light, fruity red also works if sparkling wine is not an option.
A dry cider does the same job for less money. What the cheese needs from a drink is acidity to reset the palate between bites, and a tannic or heavily oaked bottle brings weight instead, which leaves the paste tasting like plain cream.
Finn vs Brillat-Savarin
Finn was built to answer Brillat-Savarin and the other French cream-enriched cheeses, so the comparison is a natural one for anyone deciding between the two.
| Finn | Brillat-Savarin | |
|---|---|---|
| Origin | Herefordshire, England | Burgundy and Normandy, France |
| Rennet | Cardoon (thistle), vegetarian | Traditional animal rennet |
| Aging | 2 to 3 weeks | Similar short ripening, varies by producer |
| Flavor | Lactic and fresh, walnut and mushroom with age | Buttery and mild, tangier finish |
| Availability | UK specialty shops, seasonal production | Widely available at specialty cheese counters |
Choose Finn when a vegetarian rennet matters or when you want to support the British answer to this style. Choose Brillat-Savarin when you want the more widely available original.
What to Use Instead When Finn Isn't Available
Brillat-Savarin is the closest substitute in both texture and intent, sharing the same cream-enriched category even though it comes from a different country and tradition.
Délice de Bourgogne or a triple-cream Vignotte-style cheese can also stand in, though both typically use animal rennet, so check the label if that distinction matters for your recipe or your guests.
Buy any of these at the same stage of ripeness rather than the same age. All of them travel from dense to loose within a few days, so a wedge already bulging at the cut face has passed the point where Finn would have been worth serving.
Buying Finn: Why Availability Is Seasonal
Finn is not made year-round. Production follows the grazing season, since the cows' diet of fresh grass shapes the milk quality the cheese depends on, so the richest and most consistent batches appear in spring and summer.
In practice, that means Finn effectively disappears from shelves in February and March, right when the herd's tight calving window falls before the grass has grown back. Shoppers who want it reliably should plan around the April-to-September grazing season rather than expecting year-round stock.
A standard round weighs 200 grams and measures about 9 centimeters across and 4 centimeters tall, small enough that some retailers sell it specifically for cheese wedding cakes. Prices vary widely by retailer: The Fine Cheese Co. lists it around £10.75, Cheeseworks around £12.00, Hilltop Farm Shop around £5.35, and The Mousetrap Cheese Shop around £4.48, so it's worth checking more than one source before assuming a single going rate.
Neal's Yard Creamery also distributes Finn through Trethowan Brothers, the Somerset makers of Gorwydd Caerphilly, a partnership built on a 28-year friendship between Westhead and Trethowan Brothers founder Todd Trethowan. The two companies now cross-sell each other's cheeses as a natural fit given their shared handcrafted approach.
Nutrition and Safety
A 100-gram serving of Finn runs about 345 calories, 31 grams of fat, and 15 grams of protein, reflecting the added cream that defines the style. Salt sits around 1.7 grams per 100 grams.
Finn is made with pasteurized milk, which makes it a safer choice than raw-milk soft cheeses for pregnant women and others avoiding unpasteurized dairy.
Storing Finn
A paste this soft takes on whatever sits beside it in the fridge, so the wrapping and the shelf both matter more here than with a hard cheese. Cheese paper holds the rind's moisture without sealing it in, where plastic film presses the rind flat against the paste until the surface turns slick.
A whole Finn round keeps for about three and a half weeks from its production date if properly refrigerated. Once cut, eat it within a few days, since the exposed cream-enriched paste dries and loses texture faster than a firmer cheese.
When the centre collapses and the paste runs instead of holding a cut, the round has gone past its window. It is still edible at that stage, but the contrast between ripened rind and fresher core has gone, and that contrast is the reason to buy Finn.
