Flagship is Beecher's Handmade Cheese's signature cheddar, made in full view of shoppers through the glass-walled kitchen at Seattle's Pike Place Market. It is built from a cheddar base crossed with Gruyere-style cultures, which pushes the flavor toward nutty and sweet rather than sharp and tangy.
The cheese anchors two well-known products: the block cheddar sold on its own, and Beecher's World's Best Mac and Cheese, which built much of the brand's national reputation after appearances on The Martha Stewart Show and Oprah's list of favorite things.
In This Article
How Kurt Dammeier Built Beecher's Around a College Cheese
Kurt Beecher Dammeier is a fourth-generation Puget Sound native who graduated from Washington State University in 1982 with an economics degree. At WSU he discovered Cougar Gold, the university creamery's canned cheddar, and later cited it as the direct inspiration for founding his own cheese company.
Dammeier had no cheesemaking background. He sold his family's printing business in 1994, founded the investment firm Sugar Mountain Capital in 1998, and built its food-operating arm starting with the 1999 acquisition of Seattle grocer Pasta & Co.
To actually make the cheese, he hired Brad Sinko, a microbiologist who had run a family cheesemaking operation in Oregon, to develop the recipes and run production.
The company name honors Dammeier's great-grandfather, Beecher McKenzie, reportedly a cheese enthusiast known for buying whole wheels of Stilton. Beecher's secured its hard-to-get Pike Place Market lease in 2002 and opened in November 2003, built around a glass-walled make room, nearly 1,000 square feet of windows, so shoppers could watch the cheese being made.
Dammeier has said the goal from day one was to "take artisanal-style cheese and make it an every day cheese," not a rare treat reserved for specialty counters. "I wanted to stand for something," he has said of the branding behind Beecher's.
That same philosophy shaped a second venture. Dammeier founded the nonprofit Pure Food Kids Foundation around 2004 to teach Seattle-area grade schoolers how to read food labels, funded in part by a 1 percent cut of sales across his food companies.
How Flagship Is Made
Flagship starts with pasteurized cow's milk from a roughly 50/50 Holstein and Jersey blend, principally sourced from Green Acres Farm in Duvall, Washington, from cows raised without added hormones or antibiotics. The cheese uses microbial, vegetarian rennet rather than an animal-derived enzyme.
Beecher's reportedly owns roughly 200 of the dairy cows itself and leases them back to Green Acres to farm, a structure that gives the cheesemakers more say over what the herd eats. That arrangement is newer than the company itself.
An earlier Beecher's location in New York City sourced its milk from Dutch Hollow Farms in upstate New York before that shop closed in October 2022. Beecher's in-person retail has been Seattle-focused ever since.
What sets Flagship apart technically is its culture: cheddar cultures crossed with Gruyere and Emmental-style cultures, rather than a straight cheddar culture. That blend is why Flagship reads closer to a cheddar-Swiss hybrid than a classic sharp English cheddar, smoother and nuttier, with less of the tangy bite.
Standard Flagship is produced in 40-pound blocks and aged around 15 months. The Pike Place facility runs production continuously, turning out more than 500,000 pounds of cheese a year across Beecher's full lineup, with Flagship accounting for roughly 200,000 of those pounds, by far the largest single share of that volume.
Flagship vs Flagship Reserve: What the Extra Aging Buys You
Flagship Reserve is not a longer-aged batch of the same cheese pulled off the line later. Beecher's makes it only on specific days when the milk composition meets a tighter standard, using the curd from those particular runs and finishing it in a different format entirely.
Reserve wheels are cloth-wrapped and aged in the open air, where they lose 14 to 16 percent of their moisture, concentrating the flavor. Beecher's hand-turns the wheels daily for the first two months, three times a week for two more months, then weekly for the remainder of a 13-to-16-month aging period.
Finished wheels run 8 to 9 inches across, about 12 inches tall, and roughly 18 pounds, made from curd with slightly lower moisture and higher salt than the standard block.
| Flagship | Flagship Reserve | |
|---|---|---|
| Format | 40-lb rindless block | Clothbound wheel, about 18 lb |
| Aging | About 15 months | 13 to 16 months, hand-turned throughout |
| Texture | Firm with a slight crumble | Firmer and more brittle, lower moisture |
| Flavor | Nutty, buttery, caramel notes | More concentrated; caramel, fruit, and earthy notes |
| Typical price | Roughly $8-25 per pound depending on retailer | Around $25 per pound at specialty shops |
Choose standard Flagship for everyday cooking and snacking. Choose Flagship Reserve for a cheese board where the concentrated, more complex flavor is the point.
What Flagship Tastes Like
Flagship reads as robust and nutty, with hints of browned butter and caramel, and a slight crumble in the texture rather than cheddar's typical firm snap. Reviewers consistently describe it as a cross between cheddar and Gruyere: smoother, sweeter, and less tangy than a traditional sharp English-style cheddar like Cabot Clothbound or Grafton.
Flagship Reserve pushes further in the same direction rather than a different one. Culture magazine describes it as firm and smooth with a slight brittleness, a bold flavor balanced by sweet vegetal notes of earth and butter, and a clean, creamy finish.
The World's Best Mac and Cheese
Beecher's has served its World's Best Mac and Cheese since the Pike Place shop opened in November 2003, originally created as an in-store demo of what shoppers could do with the cheese they had just watched being made. The recipe traces back to a four-cheese frozen mac and cheese sold at Dammeier's earlier grocery, Pasta & Co, reworked through more than twenty test versions before landing on the final formula.
The official recipe blends Flagship with Beecher's Just Jack, a Monterey Jack-style cheese, at roughly 8 ounces of Flagship to 2 ounces of Just Jack, about a 4:1 ratio, seasoned with small amounts of chipotle powder and granulated garlic. The pasta is deliberately undercooked before baking, since it keeps softening in the cheese sauce in the oven.
The dish appeared on The Martha Stewart Show twice and was named one of Oprah's Favorite Things, exposure that helped push Beecher's packaged mac and cheese into more than 12,000 supermarkets nationwide.
How to Use Flagship in the Kitchen
Beyond the signature mac and cheese, Flagship melts well enough for grilled cheese, gratins, and quesadillas, and its nutty flavor holds up in a fondue or a cheese sauce without needing a sharper cheddar to carry it. It also grates cleanly for topping soups or baked dishes.
Dammeier has talked about using cheese the way a chef uses a seasoning rather than a headline ingredient: "I like it to be a seasoning, or an ingredient even at levels that are not perceptible as cheese, just to build that umami background," he has said, comparing the effect to "a bass note in a song." That framing fits Flagship's role in the mac and cheese recipe, where its job is to carry flavor through the whole dish rather than announce itself in every bite.
On a board, Flagship slices well and pairs naturally with things that complement its caramel and browned-butter notes, fruit preserves, toasted nuts, or a drizzle of honey.
What to Drink With Flagship
A medium-bodied amber ale or a nutty brown ale matches Flagship's own nutty character well. For wine, a Chardonnay with some oak or a light Pinot Noir avoids overpowering the cheese's milder, sweeter profile.
What to Use Instead When Flagship Isn't Available
A 1:1 blend of sharp cheddar cheese and Gruyere cheese is the closest approximation, since that combination mirrors what Flagship's own cross-cultured recipe is doing: cheddar's base structure with Gruyere's nuttiness and melt quality layered on top.
Straight Gruyere alone works as a substitute in melted applications like a gratin or mac and cheese, though it lacks the firmer, slightly crumbly bite that a cheddar base provides.
Buying Flagship: Standard, Reserve, or Extra-Aged
Flagship is Beecher's most widely distributed cheese, but sourcing directly from the company means going through Beecher's own cafes at Pike Place Market, Bellevue Square, Sea-Tac Airport, and Paine Field, or through Murray's Cheese as the official online retail partner. Grocery availability includes Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, and Costco, where club pricing runs considerably lower than specialty grocers.
That gap between channels is wide in practice. Costco has sold standard Flagship for roughly $7.49 to $12.49 a pound at club pricing, while the same cheese runs closer to $24.99 a pound at H-E-B and around $25.99 at QFC.
Flagship Reserve sits near $25 a pound at specialty shops like Mill Road Cheese Shop. The "reserve premium" over standard Flagship, in other words, depends heavily on which retailer's regular price you're comparing it against.
Beecher's regularly places in ACS, the country's top cheesemaker competition, and in World Cheese Awards competitions across its Flagship lineup, including a first-place finish for Flagship Reserve in the clothbound cheddar category in 2019 and again in the cloth-wrapped aged category in 2024. Exact placements shift year to year across categories, so treat any specific award year as a snapshot rather than a permanent credential.
One award claim is worth double-checking before you repeat it. Beecher's own materials describe multiple Best of Show runner-up finishes over the years, but the 2022 competition results show that honor actually went to Flagsheep, a different Beecher's cheese, not Flagship.
Standard Flagship still took second place in its own aged-cheddar category that year. That's a real result, just a separate one from the overall Best of Show race.
Nutrition and Safety
A one-ounce serving of Flagship runs about 120 calories, 10 grams of fat, and 6 grams of protein, typical of a semi-hard aged cheddar-style cheese.
Flagship is made with pasteurized milk, which makes it a safer choice than raw-milk cheeses for pregnant women and others avoiding unpasteurized dairy.
Storing Flagship
A properly wrapped piece keeps for three to four weeks in the refrigerator. Once cut, use it within two weeks for the best texture, since the exposed face dries out faster than an unopened block.
