We were lucky to catch up with Kate Johnson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kate, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

In 2005 my husband and I moved with our two young daughters to a small farm in Boulder County which had been a lifelong dream of mine. A couple of years later we decided to get two dairy goats as 4-H projects for the girls. Once our first doe had kids, and once those kids were weaned, I had a lot of milk to deal with. She gave us over a gallon a day! So I started making my own cheese, and eventually entered some of them in the Boulder County Fair’s amateur cheesemaking contest. After winning a Champion ribbon at that fair, the Extension Office (who organizes the fair along with 4-H clubs and leaders) asked me to teach a class. It was a big hit and soon the requests for more classes started coming in. I got a bit more formal training by taking an advanced course from some Vermont cheesemakers as well as one in San Fransico but realized that there weren’t really very many people making cheese in Colorado – let alone teaching it. I continued teaching a few classes here and there as a hobby for several more years until I just couldn’t deny the popularity of the topic and decided to go for it by opening a cheesemaking school in Longmont where I live.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The Art of Cheese teaches both in-person and online classes with the goal of showing regular folks, most of whom don’t have dairy animals in their back yard like I do, that it’s not that hard to make your own cheese at home. We try to make it as approachable and relevant to the beginner cheesemaker just starting out as it is to more advanced cheesemakers who are trying to perfect the craft and make some really sophisticated cheeses.

Our in-person classes are small and personal and we teach many different cheeses from all types of milk – including a variety of milks that can be purchased at the local grocery store. We try to incorporate minimal ingredients with simple equipment so that students don’t have to spend a lot to get started. And each in-person class ends with a visit in the barnyard with our friendly herd of Nubian dairy goats.

What I’m most proud of is how we were able to quickly pivot during the pandemic to start offering online courses. We developed live sessions using the Zoom platform and soon were reaching students all over the world. We developed over 70 online courses in the 15 months that we were unable to offer in-person classes and those recordings are still available for purchase.

I’m also proud of the volunteer work I’ve done with our local 4-h program for the past fifteen years, helping with youth development through the Dairy and Utility Goat programs. And for the past couple of years I’ve also coordinated the amateur cheesemaking contest at the Boulder County Fair.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I didn’t set out to become a cheesemaking school instructor, let alone to open the first year-round brick-and-mortar cheesemaking school in Colorado. My background is in counseling and life coaching with an emphasis on training and development. But once our first pet dairy goat weaned her babies and I found myself with over a gallon of milk a day, I decided to learn to make cheese. Because of my passion for training and teaching, I guess it was inevitable that I’d eventually teach a cheesemaking class. And then another, and another and pretty soon I had a nice little side gig going.

At about the same time, I was trying to grow my life coaching business and no matter how hard I worked on my “elevator pitch,” I just couldn’t seem to get people excited about signing up for a 3-6 month coaching process. But when I told people I also taught cheesemaking classes, their eyes lit up and the excitement was palpable.

So, I followed my own coaching advice – “follow the energy” – and decided to go full time and open a cheesemaking school!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

About 4 or 5 years after we opened The Art of Cheese, we found out that the creamery where our classroom was located was going to need to use our classroom space for their own needs and we were given a 3 week notice to move out. To cap it off, I was out of town for the next month and my main other instructor/staff member was 8 months pregnant! After a brief moment of panic, especially since we had a full line-up of sold out classes for the next 2 months, I got busy reaching out to my many contacts in the area to come up with creative solutions for classroom space. We were able to partner with a local real estate office, co-working spaces, an extension office, a grange building and several other venues to get all our classes into new venues so that we didn’t have to cancel any classes. And then, I talked my husband into letting me convert our farmhouse garage into a dedicated classroom space, which opened in the late summer of 2019.

Seven months later, we had to bounce back and become resilient again when the pandemic shut down our classroom and all in-person classes for well over a year. We used that time to create a robust and comprehensive online program and now have students from all over the world!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.theartofcheese.com
• Instagram: @theartofcheeselongmont
• Facebook: @theartofcheese
• Youtube: @theartofcheese9636

Image Credits

Kate Johnson