Bath Blue is made to a traditional Stilton recipe at Park Farm in Kelston, just outside Bath, from the milk of the farm's own organic herd.
It cannot be sold as Stilton, and the reason has nothing to do with how it is made.
In 2014 it was named Supreme Champion at the World Cheese Awards, which means a cheese barred from using the name beat every cheese that is allowed to.
In This Article
What Is Bath Blue?
It is an organic cow's milk blue from the Padfield family, who have farmed Park Farm since Edward Ernest Padfield bought the 240 acres in August 1914.
Graham Padfield restarted cheesemaking in the buildings where his grandmother had made Cheddar on this farm some eighty years earlier, which makes him the fourth generation on the land and the second to make cheese on it.
The milk is pasteurised and comes off the farm's own cows rather than a tanker round.
Fifty yards is a specification rather than a detail of the site plan. A new dairy was built in 2015 that close to the milking parlour, so the milk is in the vat almost as soon as it leaves the animal.
Bath Blue is one of four cheeses the farm makes, alongside a bloomy square, a semi-hard called Wyfe of Bath and an organic Somerset cheddar.
The farm is registered organic with Organic Farmers and Growers, which rules out fungicides, pesticides and artificial fertiliser on the ground the cows graze.
Why Can't It Be Called Stilton?
The recipe is a Stilton recipe and nobody disputes that, which makes the naming rule feel arbitrary until you look at what the rule actually protects.
Stilton has held Protected Designation of Origin status since 1996, and a PDO protects a place before it protects a method.
The designation allows the name in three counties only: Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.
Kelston is in Somerset, roughly a hundred and thirty miles from the nearest of them.
So the cheese fails on geography and on nothing else. It is pasteurised, as the PDO requires, and it follows the make.
This is worth understanding rather than resenting, because a designation that let anyone using the recipe carry the name would protect nothing at all.
The odd part is the name it cannot use versus the name it can. There is no protection on the word blue, so the cheese goes out as Bath Blue and the town does the identifying work instead.
For a shopper the consequence is small but real. If you want this cheese you cannot find it by searching for Stilton, and a cheesemonger will not file it there either.
What you can do is describe the make. Ask for a Stilton-style blue from outside the counties and any decent counter will know what you mean.
The history behind the name, and the villages it actually came from, belongs to the protected cheese.
You cannot find this cheese by searching for Stilton and a cheesemonger will not file it there. Ask for a Stilton-style blue from outside the protected counties.
What Else Does the Name Rule Out?
Geography is only one of the two ways to be locked out of the word Stilton, and the second one catches a cheese made inside the counties.
The PDO also requires pasteurised milk, which it has done since 1996.
That means a raw-milk cheese made to the Stilton recipe in Nottinghamshire, on a Stilton farm, by Stilton makers, still cannot use the name.
Stichelton is exactly that cheese and it exists because of exactly that rule.
Put the two side by side and the designation becomes legible. Bath Blue is barred by where it is, Stichelton by what it is made from, and neither is barred by how it is made.
Both cheeses are therefore doing the same thing under different constraints: making the cheese and giving up the word.
A designation that protected the recipe instead of the place would have caught neither of them, and would also have stopped meaning anything the moment a factory copied the method.
That is the trade a PDO makes. It guarantees where a cheese came from and says almost nothing about whether it is good.
The corollary is the useful one for a shopper. Once you know the name is a place rule, a cheese that cannot use the name stops looking like an imitation and starts looking like a cheese with a different address.
How Do You Make a Stilton at a Fraction of the Scale?
The vat is roughly half the size a Stilton dairy would use, and after the vat the curd goes into individual buckets rather than a single bulk run.
Curds are ladled by hand and milled by hand, which is slow and is the point.
Handling curd gently leaves the pieces intact instead of smearing them together, and the gaps between intact pieces are the channels the blue later grows along.
Doing it in buckets also means a batch is not one decision. A maker can treat the cheeses in front of them differently on a day when the milk is behaving differently.
Small scale is usually described as romantic. Here it is closer to a technical choice with a texture consequence you can see on the cut face.
The scale also sets the ceiling. A dairy working a half-size vat cannot supply a supermarket, so the cheese stays on specialist counters whether or not it wins anything.
Buckets have a cost as well as a benefit. Every extra vessel is another surface to clean and another place a batch can go wrong, which is why larger dairies stopped doing it.
Milling by hand is the slowest step of all. It breaks the drained curd into pieces before salting, and doing it by hand keeps the pieces uneven rather than uniform.
Why Pierce Every Cheese by Hand?
Piercing is what lets air into a blue so the mould can grow, and the Berkshire blue does it with a machine that drives a row of needles down in one stroke.
Bath Blue is pierced by hand, one cheese at a time, by seven cheesemakers.
The reason is information rather than tradition. A needle pushed by hand tells you how much moisture is in that particular cheese, because a wetter paste gives way differently from a drier one.
Knowing that, the maker changes how much they pierce this cheese rather than applying one setting to the batch.
A wetter cheese pierced as hard as a dry one over-blues and turns sharp; a dry one pierced too lightly stays pale in the middle.
Hand piercing is how a small dairy gets consistency out of milk that is not consistent, which is the opposite of how a large one gets it.
A large dairy standardises the milk so one setting works on everything. A small one leaves the milk alone and varies the treatment instead.
Seven people doing this is also a real number rather than a marketing one. It tells you the batch is small enough that a person can hold each cheese.
What Does the 2014 Win Actually Mean?
Awards are easy to overstate and this one is easy to understate, so it is worth being precise about what happened.
The World Cheese Awards named Bath Blue Supreme Champion in 2014, judged against more than 2600 entries from around the world.
Supreme Champion is not a category prize. It is the single cheese the final panel puts above every other cheese in the competition that year.
Graham Padfield's own reaction, that he could not quite believe it, is the reaction of someone who entered a farm cheese against the industry.
The thing it does not mean is that Bath Blue is permanently the best blue you can buy. Judging happens on one day, on the wheels submitted, and a farmhouse cheese varies.
What it does mean is that the make is capable of that, which is a fair reason to try it and an unfair reason to expect a revelation from every piece.
It is also worth knowing how the judging runs. Cheeses are assessed without their labels in front of the judges, so a farm entry and an industrial one arrive on the table the same way.
That is the part that makes the result interesting. The panel was not choosing a story about a family farm; it was choosing a cheese.
Does Organic Change the Cheese?
Organic certification is a farming standard, so the honest answer is that it changes the field before it changes the flavour.
No artificial fertiliser means a slower, more mixed sward rather than a fast monoculture of ryegrass, and the cows eat what grows.
Whether a taster could pick that out blind is not something anyone should claim without a blind trial to point at.
What it does reliably change is the input the maker is working with, because a herd on varied pasture gives milk that shifts through the season.
That is the same variability the hand piercing exists to manage, so the two decisions are connected rather than separate selling points.
Treat the certification as a statement about the farm, which is what it is, and judge the cheese on the cheese.
The one thing it does guarantee is worth having on its own. Nothing sprayed on that pasture reaches the milk, because nothing was sprayed on it.
Organic also constrains the herd rather than only the field, since the standard limits routine medication and requires grazing, and both of those shape what the cows are eating in June against November.
What Does It Taste Like?
The frame of reference is Stilton and it should be, because the recipe is the same and the cheese does not pretend otherwise.
It carries the classic notes: a sharp saltiness through the veins, balanced against a richness in the paste.
The part people remember is the finish, which runs long and reads as toasted hazelnut and melted butter on toast.
Texture is firm and slightly crumbly rather than buttery, which is what a Stilton-style paste does and is the opposite of a Channel Island blue.
Eight to ten weeks is a young age for this style, so it lands milder than a mature Colston Bassett would.
Take it out of the fridge half an hour before eating. Cold blunts the hazelnut finish, which is the thing worth paying for here.
Against the other blues on this site it sits closest to the Vermont one in restraint, though it gets there through youth rather than through a dry paste.
It is the opposite of Barkham Blue in texture: crumbly where that one is buttery, ivory where that one is gold.
| What differs | What it means when you buy it |
|---|---|
| Made in Somerset, outside the three protected counties | It cannot be labelled or shelved as Stilton, so you have to ask for it by name. |
| One organic herd on one farm against pooled milk | Batches move through the season, and the cheese is not identical in March and September. |
| Half-size vat, buckets, hand ladling and hand milling | A more open curd structure, which is what the veining travels through. |
| Pierced by hand, cheese by cheese | Blueing is matched to each cheese rather than set for a batch. |
| Eight to ten weeks | Milder and less sharp than a long-matured Stilton. |
Which Piece Should You Ask For?
There are two sizes on offer and the choice matters more for how long you have to eat it than for what it costs. The normal retail piece is a 200 gram segment; a whole cheese is a cylinder of about 1.5 kilograms.
Look for a dry crusty rind rather than a damp or sticky one, and a paste that is pale ivory with fine veining rather than grey and wet at the edges.
Keep the cut face in waxed paper on the warmest fridge shelf, and eat it within a couple of weeks rather than storing it like a hard cheese.
If you are buying a whole cylinder, cut it in wedges from the top down rather than scooping the middle out with a spoon. Scooping leaves the outer paste to dry against air.
On a board it sits comfortably beside the French sheep blue or the softer Italian one, since neither is trying to do the same job.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Bath Blue FAQ
The naming rule, the award and the age are the three things a shopper standing at a counter most often needs stated without hedging.
It is made to a Stilton recipe but it cannot legally be called Stilton. The PDO restricts the name to Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and Bath is in Somerset.
Yes. It was named Supreme Champion at the 2014 World Cheese Awards, judged against more than 2600 entries. That is the single top prize rather than a category win.
Less than a mature Stilton. It is sold at eight to ten weeks, so the salt and the tang are present but the long hazelnut finish is the part that dominates.
