Berkswell was a hard sheep milk cheese made on a farm in the West Midlands, and for most of thirty-five years it was the best-known English cheese of its kind.
It is not made any more. Ram Hall Dairy closed in 2023, and nobody took the recipe on.
Almost every page still ranking for the name describes it in the present tense, which is why this one starts with the part that changed.
In This Article
Can You Still Buy Berkswell?
This is the first thing to settle because everything else depends on it, and the answer has changed recently. No, you cannot: the last wheels went through the trade in early 2024 and the supply ended there.
Anything sold as Berkswell after that is either very old stock or mislabelled. There is no dairy making it and no new production to wait for.
That matters because the cheese aged for a minimum of six months, so the pipeline emptied slowly and shops carried it well past the day the make stopped.
Anyone who saw it on a counter in 2024 and went back for more has run into a supply that simply stopped rather than a shop that stopped stocking it.
What Happened to Ram Hall Dairy?
The Fletcher family had farmed at Ram Hall since 1881 and had been milking sheep there since 1989.
Stephen Fletcher decided to close in 2023. He gave ill health, rising costs and hard trading conditions as the reasons, and by his own account had not taken a weekend off in years.
Sheep dairying is the harder end of the job. The animals need more attention than cows, skilled help is difficult to find, and each ewe gives a small amount of milk for the work involved.
The flock of around 800 sheep was sold to a Cotswolds drinks company, which now supplies the milk to King Stone Dairy for a different cheese and takes the whey for vodka.
Fletcher sold the cheesemaking equipment, left the farm, and helped set up the milking at the new site.
So the flock continues and the cheese does not. That distinction is the one most of the coverage blurs.
Production ended in 2024. Anything sold under this name now is remaining stock, so judge it on the piece in front of you rather than on the reputation.
What Did Berkswell Taste Like?
Sheep's milk cheeses tend to divide people, and this one was unusual in how consistently it did not. It read sweet and savoury at once, with pineapple and caramel the two notes people reached for most often.
The paste was firm, dense and slightly granular, pale butter rather than white, and it held a long finish that kept moving after you swallowed.
The rind was natural and slightly chewy, rusty brown-red with orange and white blotches across it. It was not eaten.
Made from raw milk with animal rennet, so it was neither a vegetarian cheese nor a pasteurised one, and both of those facts narrowed who could buy it.
The wheels ran about 8 inches across and 4 inches high at 3 to 4kg, which is small enough that a shop could reasonably cut through one in a week.
For the sheep milk sweetness, the Spanish wheel at around twelve months is the closest widely available thing.
For the hard grating job, the Tuscan sheep cheese gets there with more salt and less caramel.
Why Was Berkswell Shaped Like That?
The shape was the cheese's signature and the reason a wedge was recognisable across a counter, and it came about the plainest way possible. The curd was drained in plastic colanders, and the cheese kept the shape of the vessel.
Draining is the step where a soft curd loses whey and takes a form, so whatever it sits in becomes the mould.
That gave it a squat, curved profile people usually described as a flying saucer, with the perforations printed into the rind.
The choice was practical rather than decorative. The family found the words Cheese Room under old paint at Ram Hall and wanted to make cheese there, but the original recipe was long gone, so they started from a Caerphilly formula and let it evolve into something else.
A colander was what came to hand for draining, and it stayed.
What Should You Buy Instead?
Recommending a substitute for a cheese that no longer exists is a different job from recommending one for a cheese that is merely hard to get, because nothing will ever restock. Nothing replaces it exactly, and the honest answer depends on which half of the cheese you were after.
For the hard sheep milk texture, a Manchego aged a year gets you closest on density and grain, though it runs nuttier and drier and will not give you the pineapple.
For the sweetness, an Ossau-Iraty style cheese from the Pyrenees is the better direction, because that family shares the pressed sheep milk sweetness rather than only the hardness.
There is a closer link than that, and it comes with a catch. David Jowett, who learned cheesemaking on an internship at Ram Hall, began making an Ossau-Iraty style cheese called Bibury at King Stone Dairy in 2024, using milk from the flock Ram Hall sold.
Bibury is the nearest thing to a descendant that exists. It is not Berkswell, it is made at a different dairy to a different recipe, and it is worth trying on its own terms rather than as a replacement.
The catch is that King Stone announced in May 2026 that it is not making sheep milk cheeses this year and is concentrating on cow's milk instead. Bibury still turns up at cheesemongers, so if you want to taste what that flock's milk does, buy it when you see it.
An aged Pecorino Toscano is the easiest of these to find and the cheapest, and it will do the job on a board if you are not chasing the original.
Do not substitute a cow's milk hard cheese here. The sheep milk was carrying the sweetness, and swapping the animal removes the part people actually remember.
Raw milk and animal rennet both narrow who can eat it, and raw-milk cheese guidance covers the first of those.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Berkswell FAQ
The two things people ask once they find out it has stopped.
No one has. The equipment was sold, the family left the farm, and the flock went to a different dairy making a different cheese. A revival would mean rebuilding the whole operation rather than restarting a paused one.
No, and it is not sold as Berkswell. Bibury uses milk from the same flock but is made to an Ossau-Iraty style recipe at a different dairy by a different cheesemaker. King Stone has also paused its sheep milk cheeses for 2026, so treat it as a related cheese rather than a continuation.
