Joe McNamee: My first taste of ‘smelly cheese’ in West Cork

Left: Quinlan Steele, son of Veronica Steele and now the cheesemaker at Milleens Cheese, in Eyeries, Beara Peninsula, stands in the doorway of his former home, where his mother once stood when she gave writer Joe McNamee his first taste of her world-renowned Irish Farmhouse Cheese. Right: Leitrim Hill Creamery's 2026 Irish Cheese Awards Supreme Champion 'Cnoc Liatroma' cheese. PictureL Finbarr O'Rourke

I spent much of my youth rambling around Beara Peninsula in West Cork. One late summer eve when I was 18, a gang of us wound up in a farmyard just outside Eyeries, home to a family of ‘hippie blow-ins’. This is where they made what my comrades dubbed the ‘smelly cheese’. Leaning at the doorway was cheesemaker-in-chief, Veronica Steele. Someone joked about a whiff in the air. A wicked glint in her eye, Veronica brought out the aforementioned ‘smelly cheese’, daring us to sample. Every last one of my comrades balked at the smell alone, a pungent, sweaty tang, cousin to the aroma of runners I left out on the windowsill every night, too smelly to bring indoors. With all the hollow bravado of a city boy showing off to country fellows, I volunteered.

Cheese is probably my favourite food. Good cheese, bread, and wine would be my final death row meal. It wasn’t alway thus. Cheese was rare in my childhood, if it was even cheese. Calvita came in a pale blue box sporting a beaming blonde girl with a toothy grin. It comprised 60% ‘cheese’, the rest was vegetable oils and milk proteins. Bland, flavourless, it tasted like melting rubber. Then ‘singles’ arrived: individually wrapped slices, these were surely rubber, polished to a high, orange sheen. Under heat, they shrivelled like burning plastic. My first appreciation of cheese began with toasties, industrial co-op cheddar grated on to white sliced pan, grilled to golden-flecked, molten bubbles. In a home where food was all fuel and no flavour, they were near my sole sustenance throughout my teens, coleslaw on the side.

Now, here I was in West Cork, backed into a corner by my own big mouth. Wearing my best game face, I closed my eyes and bit down, then stopped, eyes popping wide open as I entered an entirely new world. Creamy, lush, gooey, rich, milky, sweet, salty. A tang on the tongue. Flavours of flowers, grass, herbs. Of course, I said none of those things. I knew no better. But I did know I had never tasted anything like it in my life. A taste so entrancing, I accepted a second piece. It was years later when I recognised that first tasting of Milleens cheese started me on a food journey that continues to this day.

Veronica Steele began making Milleens 50 years ago in 1976, the very first Irish Farmhouse Cheese and the food writer John McKenna once dubbed the ‘Big Bang’ of the modern Irish food producer movement. Veronica, in turn, taught others: Jeffa Gill, maker of Durrus cheese, then Giana Ferguson, maker of Gubbeen. After that, the farmhouse cheese revolution truly took flight so much so that, in 1983, CÁIS, the Association of Irish Cheesemakers, was founded in 1983. The biennial 2026 Irish Cheese Awards recently took place at Cloughjordan House in Co Tipperary, featuring winners in 14 distinct classes, with 150 cheeses from 30 cheesemakers across the country. Judged by international experts, prize winners once again equate to a cheese board of world-class standard.

To my mind, Irish cheesemakers are the aristocrats of the Irish food world, even if they’ve often had to fight hard just to keep producing. Two of my most favourite cheeses were Desmond and Gabriel, hard raw milk cheeses made by Bill Hogan and Seán Ferry, in Schull. In 2002, the Dept of Agriculture impounded £20,000 worth of their cheese and shut down their production, citing a delayed TB test. Bill and Seán fought and won multiple court appeals, employing Swiss experts to prove their high temperature, thermophilic technique prohibited the survival of TB bacteria. Though science was a winning witness, their business was fatally wounded. Bill retired from cheesemaking, Seán is now head cheesemaker at Macroom Buffalo Cheese. Desmond and Gabriel, the stars of my finest cheese toasties are no more.

And yet the cheesemakers continue to battle on, at times even educating officialdom. Though a stifling bureaucracy can still struggle to comprehend the bacterial mysteries of this magical, living fare, Irish Farmhouse Cheese is the greatest ambassador of all when it comes to spreading the gospel of finest Irish food.

• CÁIS: irishcheese.ie

Table Talk

Blas na Samhna (Oct 28-Nov 30) returns to the City of the Tribes, as Blas na Gaillimhe/A Taste of Galway present a Taste of November, showcasing Galway’s restaurants, cafes, chefs and food producers.

Events include wild food walks in Barna Woods with forager Margaret Leahy, Samhain wine and storytelling at Daróg with Michelin Guide award-winning sommelier Zsolt Lukács, barmbrack taiyaki at Kombu Ramen & Bao Bar serving an Irish–Japanese Halloween menu, and sensory tasting and herbal craft by candlelight at Brigit’s Garden.

• atasteofgalway.com/events/

Although running since Thursday, the best of Savour Kilkenny continues until Monday when it finishes with a Samhain Spectacular in Flame & Sound with Kila, and the food stage and festival market are in situ for the next two days, starring amongst others, Irish Examiner columnist Eunice Power, Rory O’Connell, Rachel Allen and Kevin Dundon.

• savourkilkenny.com

Today’s Special

There can only be one product featured here today, the Supreme Champion at the CÁIS 2026 Irish Cheese Awards, Leitrim Hill Creamery’s Cnoc Liatroma’ Goat’s Cheese (€8.50), which was awarded the newly minted Veronica Steele Perpetual Cup.

Made from raw goat’s milk from their own herd and that of other local producers, Lisa Gifford, daughter Gypsy and wife Richelle, produce this gorgeous cheese on their smallholding in Drumcong, Co Leitrim.

Having learned how to make goat’s cheese in Serbia, then 75-year-old US-born Lisa moved to her grandparents’ home county in 2016 and began making Cnoc Liatroma. With a nose somewhere between yeasty bread and astringent honey, there is a sublime and singular purity on the palate to this butter-soft, creamy cheese, with a salty-sweet citric hum that simply demands another mouthful to keep that pleasure on repeat.

• leitrimhillcreamery.com