The Bay Area is already unmatched in indie grocery store quality (Bi-Rite, Berkeley Bowl, Rainbow Grocery, Good Life, Other Avenues…), but Gus’s Community Market gets the prize right now, at this very moment, for something on the shelves that’s artisanal, unusual, and getting rarer by the day: one of the last batches of an award-winning raw milk cheese to ever exist.
Meet Briana, the washed rind darling from the small midwestern dairy Jacobs & Brichford Farmstead Cheese, whose cheesemaking operations shut down last fall after the owner, Matthew Brichford, passed away from vascular disease in September. Brichford ran the farm with his wife Leslie Jacobs on a huge plot of land with some 450 grazing acres in Southwestern Indiana that had been in Brichford’s family for more than 200 years.
“As it is with a lot of American cheese producers, there was no real succession plan [at J&B],” explained Sarah Dvorak, the Northern California director of Gourmet Imports, one of the distributors that brought Briana to San Francisco from the Midwest. “The soul of the operation lived with Matthew.”
Like Briana (which, by the way, is pronounced bri-ANN-a, a portmanteau of “Brichford” and “Indiana”), Dvorak is a Midwest-to-Bay Area transplant herself: The Wisconsin native ran the small-batch cheese boutique Mission Cheese on Valencia Street from 2011 until 2020. Actually, there’s a lot of cheese trade between the Midwest and Bay Area, which make up two of the three major American dairy production regions. (The third is Vermont.)
When she began her role at Gourmet Imports, Dvorak saw something special in J&B’s cheeses, which are all made with raw milk from grass-fed cows, and made sure they got their chance to shine at local shops. Earlier this year, when Luciana Villanueva, the head cheese coordinator at Gus’s markets, needed a unique new product for Gus’s monthly promotional program for artisanal cheeses, Dvorak had just the thing.
“Cheeses are like people. You get to know them over time,” said Villanueva. “With Briana, the first introduction you get is her texture, this luscious, fudgy, delightful mouthfeel. Then, you get this grassy, stinky funkiness. Finally, you get that light, salty finish.”
Dvorak describes Briana as “grassy” as well—actually, she describes it, with her cheesemonger’s palette, as a “stone fruit shrub, fermented ripe fruits, cured ham, and grass. Like a buttered ham sandwich on a spring day in Golden Gate Park, sipping a kombucha.”
With J&B’s fully grass-fed herd (most dairy cows eat manufactured feed), it’s no wonder the terroir is so prominent. In fact, the ecological quality is so strong that Briana made my mouth, unused to Midwest histamines, go a little numb. It was surprising but kind of pleasant, certainly memorable, and ultimately unlike any cheese-tasting experience I’d ever had. Unsurprisingly, Briana has been racking up awards for her strange and wonderful qualities for a decade, most recently winning Best in Class among other washed rind ripened hard cheeses at the 2023 US Championship Cheese Contest.
That’s what makes the shuttering of J&B such a loss: Dvorak says grass-fed cheese is rare, and raw milk products are tricky to produce and sell in the US, since they’re made with unpasteurized milk and are illegal to sell if they haven’t aged for at least 60 days.
Both Dvorak and Villanueva estimate there’s only about a month’s supply of Briana left in the world—75 wheels scattered across America, including at all five Gus’s locations and the Cheese Board Collective in Berkeley. After they’re sold, she’ll be gone forever.
But there are silver linings, both for us here in the Bay and for Jacobs and her family.
For us: Another wild, transformative, raw milk cheese from J&B called Everton has a slightly longer shelf life, so local shops will be stocking it, by Dvorak’s estimate, for the next three to four months. Everton is a robust, alpine-style cheese with an uncanny essence of a brisk Swiss mountain top, and it’s a favorite of casual customers as well as professional cheesemongers: Just weeks after Brichford passed, Everton and the longer-aged Everton Premium Reserve won gold at the 2023-24 World Cheese Awards, an annual competition hosted by London-based food and drink accreditation organization Guild of Fine Food.
While you won’t get the same wild essence, if you really want a Briana dupe, Villanueva says to try Cowgirl Creamery’s Wagon Wheel or Nicasio Valley’s San Geronimo.
And the silver lining for Jacobs? Despite selling the dairy herd, she and her family are staying on the family ranch and pivoting to a beef operation, where they’ll continue Brichford’s legacy of keeping all their cows grass-fed.
“His cheese was so good, but Matthew didn’t call himself a cheesemaker. He always said he was a ‘grass farmer who made cheese,’” said Jacobs. “This way, even though we’re not doing cheese, we’re staying true to his vision.”
