The big change among cheese enthusiasts in America during the past 10 years is an awareness that how well a cheese is aged matters more than how long, and nowhere is that more evident than in recent trends in cheddar.
Even though cheddar is an English cheese (there's a village in Somerset Country called Cheddar and it's production predates the Puritans by several centuries), people rightly associate cheddar as the principal American cheese due to its ubiquity in the U.S. It's found with equal ease in the highest-end boutique cheese shops and the simplest road side convenience markets.
For years, cheese shoppers assumed that age was what mattered most in a cheddar, with three year old, four year old and even 10 year old cheddars occupying a rarefied spot in the hierarchy. However, in the last few years, a different sort of cheddar has taken the market by storm. It's clothbound cheddar, and it has a much more complex flavor than the more conventionally produced examples.
Clothbinding is the traditional English method of making cheddar. It allows the cheese to interact with the air around it and it arrives at a far more sophisticated flavor than the conventional method which is to suffocate the aging cheese in plastic. Cloth binding is a more expensive approach; Kurt Daimler of Beechers estimates that each clothbound wheel loses 10 percent of its volume during the aging process due to the evaporation of moisture. But he's happy to make the trade off for more flavor. Beecher's, which has retail outlets in Manhattan and Seattle, produces several varieties of clothbound cheddar.
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