9UNP0183SD_Casper_Jaggi_WordPress

- Good afternoon and welcome to the Wisconsin Historical Museum for another session of "History Sandwiched In." Today we're especially lucky to have back with us Jerry Apps Wisconsin author and storyteller who has chronicled everything in Wisconsin from the farm to the circus. Today he's going to talk about Casper Jaggi, Master Cheesemaker. And the book that he's going to be talking about here that he wrote is part of the Badger Biography series is on sale in our bookstore and Mr. Apps would be happy to sign a copy for you. So thank you very much, let's welcome Mr. Apps. 
- Thank you very much Paul and thank you for coming out. It's a beautiful day. 

I could think of a lot of things to do besides listening to somebody talk about cheese. But cheese is pretty interesting so that's what we're going to be doing in the next 45 minutes. Before I get into the discussion of Casper Jaggi and Swiss cheese, I have to do a commercial. I always do a commercial. I have some business cards, and I -- if you want to pick one up you're welcome to do that. I have a Web site where all of my books are described and links to all kinds of stuff. I also have a blog. Can you imagine an old guy like me with a blog? I started doing that almost a year ago and I write about things agricultural, things environmental. Two or three paragraphs a week. 

And I've been amazed at the number of people who look in on my little blog, so you're welcome to pick up a business card and get acquainted with my Web site. For those of you who may not know me and my writing, I have as Paul suggested all kinds of different topics. Most of them are related to Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. "Barns of Wisconsin" was one of my early ones. I have an adult version of the history of cheesemaking in Wisconsin as well called "Cheese: The Making of a Wisconsin Tradition." I also write fiction agriculturally related fiction. I have two novels. One is the "Travels of Increase Joseph" and the most recent one is "In a Pickle" which is all about the demise of the family farm. But let's get on to talking about cheese. Before I get specific in talking about Mr. 

Jaggi and his Brodhead Cheese Factory, a little bit of context. For those of you who may not be familiar, Wisconsin has not always been a dairy state. We started out as a wheat growing state. Those of you who know your history -- and I think most of you do or you wouldn't be sitting in these chairs today -- know that Wisconsin became a territory in 1836. We became a state in 1848. And there were the first years after statehood when the New Yorkers came in here and other New Englanders. When the immigrants began arriving, they did not come here to milk cows and make cheese. They came here to plant wheat and they did. They planted thousands of acres of wheat in Wisconsin. The southern half of the state. 

The north was still pretty much the pinery. And in 1862 in the midst of the Civil War, Wisconsin was the second leading producer of wheat in the nation. Illinois happened to be first. The western states that we associate with wheat farming today: Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, etc had not yet opened up very much. So we were a wheat growing state until 1870 or so when the production of wheat began to decline through disease, insect and the fact that the farmers were growing the same crop, the wheat crop on the same land year after year. And we saw then a tremendous decline in wheat production and the New Yorkers, the New Yorkers were largely responsible for helping Wisconsin move from a wheat growing state to a dairy state. People like William Dempster Hoard who was our governor at one time and who started "Hoard's Dairyman Magazine." There were a number of New Yorkers. Hiram Smith -- those of you familiar with the Ag campus at the UW, we have a hall named after Hiram Smith. So, these New Yorkers began to talk to all the immigrants who were coming in -- and the largest group of immigrants early on were German -- trying to convince them that dairy farming might have a future to replace wheat farming. 

But interestingly enough in those days, milking cows, making butter and making cheese were seen as women's work. No man would ever be seen dead milking one of those filthy cows. And the cows -- most farmers only had two, three -- were left to fend for themselves most of the time. They didn't feed them very well, care for them very well. The women, as I mentioned, took care of them, did the milking made the cheese in their kitchens, made the butter in their kitchens while these macho men are out driving their teams of horses, planting and harvesting wheat. Well as the wheat production, as wheat growing declined, that shift -- and it was an attitudinal shift as much as anything -- for men to wrap their minds around the fact that maybe, just maybe these cows might have some future. And what a future they had. Now our roads were not especially good in Wisconsin and the question I often get is why did we have, and still do, why do we make so much cheese? Well in the early days, the roads were so bad you could not transport fluid milk to the urban areas, Milwaukee, Chicago, Twin Cities and so you needed to do something with it in the neighborhood and thus these little cheese factories began emerging all over Wisconsin every two or three or four miles. At a crossroads, generally a church, country school and a cheese factory -- we saw that -- you still find them all over the state. 

In 1870 we had 90 cheese factories. In 1890 we had 1,100 cheese factories. In 1922 we had 2,800 cheese factories. Once these farmers caught on to the idea that there was some money in milking cows, they indeed went into dairy farming big time. In my book "Barns of Wisconsin" I chronicled the development of these big dairy barns that we still find around the state still a few left, in association with how the dairy herds developed. But now I want to get to Swiss cheese and I want to get to the Swiss, that particular immigrant group that came here beginning in the 1820s and the Swiss initially were farmers, they were not cheesemakers. They knew how to make cheese, many of them brought with them from Switzerland their cheesemaking skills. But they were caught up in the wheat growing business as well and they were caught up in the transition from wheat growing to dairy farming. Casper Jaggi, not "joggy," Jaggi. Casper Jaggi was born in Switzerland in 1893 and his biography is chronicled in this little book. 

He had a most interesting childhood and I wish I knew more about it. In Switzerland at that time the cattle were in the wintertime were in the valleys and in the summertime they were driven up into the mountains for the fresh pasture and the cheese was made up in the mountains without any electricity. Without anything that we take for granted today in the way of modern convenience. So, Casper learned how to make cheese in that fashion. He came to the United States in 1913 when he was 20 and he farmed with his brothers -- who had come earlier -- for a few years but he really liked cheesemaking. And he remembered when he was a youngster making cheese with his father and so he began working in cheese factories, and he worked in several different ones for a number of years, and before I forget, down here in the front row is Fritz Jaggi Casper Jaggi's son. And if you want the inside story on what it was like living in a cheese factory, growing up in a cheese factory, talk to Fritz when we're finished. He can give you the inside dope on the -- I'm a farm kid, my acquaintanceship with cheese factories was bringing milk to the cheese factory in Wild Rose which is my hometown. Which was a very different experience because I saw it from the farmer's perspective. Fritz saw it, lived with it -- his family lived above one of the cheese factories where Fritz 

[Casper]
 made cheese. I want to spend a fair amount of time helping you understand because it's really, to me it's really interesting, how Swiss cheese was made, historically. And one of the very interesting things that I discovered when I was asked to work on this book is the photographs of the Brodhead Cheese Factory that were available to us and I have several of them that I'm going to show you and they're sprinkled all through this book. It was unbelievable that someone had taken time to take these very quality photos of the cheese, of the Swiss cheese making process itself. So let us move along and see how Swiss cheese was made. Casper Jaggi in the flesh. I don't know if you saw the note in the Sunday State Journal, but the Sunday State Journal announced that Casper Jaggi would be here today, talking about Swiss cheese. And he is. There he is. 

So for those of you that are disappointed that this white haired guy standing up here doesn't look like he's Swiss -- which I'm not, I'm German -- that's Casper Jaggi. That's the Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory that Casper Jaggi owned and ran and at one time it was the largest Swiss cheese factory I think in the country Fritz, certainly in Wisconsin. I want to point out a couple of things. Notice on the left you see the tubes or hoops stacked up. You'll see those again. Those were used to form the Swiss cheese wheels, but let's look some more at the Brodhead Cheese Factory. And I'm old enough to have experienced exactly this kind of way of making cheese. You see the truck that's over on the left? That truck went around from farmer to farmer picking up 10 gallon milk cans. You see a row of them just in the middle of the picture. 

Those are the emptied, washed cans that the milk hauler will pick up and deliver them out to the farmer. That's the way it worked on our home farm. The milk hauler would arrive with empty cans. We had four, five cans of milk a day, that's all and left the empty cans, took the filled ones and brought them to the cheese factory as that truck is doing. Now you see off to the right you see that little silo like tank. That's a whey tank. W-H-E-Y. I think most of you are familiar with whey, but there's always someone that's not. In the cheesemaking process there are essentially two things that result. And little Miss Muffet had it right when she sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey. 

Those are the two fundamental products of the cheesemaking process. In the early days, whey was not a very valuable product. In fact, cheesemakers sometimes had a dickens of a time getting rid of it. Farmers could take whey back to their farm and feed it to the hogs and we did that at our farm. Today, whey is a very profitable product. They make all kinds of things out of whey for the food industry. But let's move along. When the milk arrives -- remember it's in these 10 gallon cans. Here's a worker dumping a can of milk into the receiving area where it is weighed and it's tested. I'm going to talk about milk testing in a moment. 

It was tested for butterfat content, butterfat content. And I'll come back to that in just a moment. Here is a gentleman working at a device that separates the cream it's a cream separator, from the milk, the raw milk. Now why? Remember I said that they're testing for butterfat? Swiss cheese is best made when the butterfat content of the milk that comes in is at 3.2%. Now, those of you who have farm backgrounds and know about agriculture know that the butterfat content of milk varies from by breed to breed in cattle. Holsteins, the black and white cows have a lower butterfat level than do Jerseys, the little cute brown ones that we never had at our farm. And in between the Ayrshires and Brown Swiss have different butterfat levels. Holsteins on average, you would hope that their butterfat would be 3.5. 

Jerseys it could be 5.5. Within the breed itself, and I'm probably sharing more than you ever wanted to know about butterfat. Within the breeds itself, the genetics determined the butterfat potential for a given cow. Some Holsteins' milk would be 3.2, 2.8 varied all over the place. And it also was affected by the quality of the feed and the time of the year. When the cows were out on pasture in the spring, fresh grass, butterfat level tended to go down. In the fall when they were fed dry feed, butterfat level tended to go up. That would drive a cheesemaker nuts, so that's why they did this. They brought the cheese, the milk down to 3.2%. Now there was cream, butterfat cream. 

Think of those synonymously. The cream that was left, the Jaggis sold the cream as cream to a creamery. Let's get some language straight. A creamery is where cream was received and butter was made. A cheese factory, or a cheese plant to use the modern day language is where milk is received and cheese was made. Now some cheese factories also made butter to confuse the issue, but creameries tended to make butter. Cheese factories tended to make cheese. And the Jaggis sold some of the cream as fresh cream as well. So, now we've separated the milk, and the milk -- this is one of the unique characteristics of historic Swiss cheese making. The milk is in this instance piped into a copper kettle, and that copper kettle would hold up to 2,000 lbs of milk, a ton. 

2,000 pounds of milk. Here's a number to remember. For almost all kinds of cheese it takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese. So now we've got up to 2,000 pounds of milk in this copper tank, a copper kettle. Some -- argue, I think maybe correctly that the copper gives Swiss cheese its special nutty flavor. I have talked to another Swiss cheese maker who didn't use copper and said that was sort of the nutty characteristic of the Swiss, but that's a whole 'nother topic that I don't want to get into. So, the milk is now in a copper tank and it is -- here is a couple things that happen. How many of you know about rennet? Yeah, quite a few of you. Historically, rennet came from calves, dairy calves. 

Rennet is a coagulator. Today, rennet is chemically manufactured. Rennet is added to milk to coagulate it, to form it into curds. A special bacterium is also added to the milk and that's what gives each kind of cheese a different set of characteristics. One of the big problems in a cheese factory, today and historically was to keep foreign bacteria out because foreign bacteria would destroy the cheesemaking process. You wanted to use special -- and oftentimes when we think of bacteria we think of it negatively. There are lots of positive dimensions to bacteria as well especially in the cheesemaking industry. So, rennet and bacteria are added and it's stirred and heated. And I have the specifics in the book. It's a very intricate process. 

One of the things that I think Fritz told me one of his early jobs was to watch the thermometer. They watched the thermometer on those kettles diligently because you don't want it to hot, don't want it too cold. And it's stirred and we're coagulating. There's a chap that's checking temperature. Now, well now how many of you would like to do that? How many of you think you're able to do that? I know I'm not. I need to back up though and tell you something that happened. And I don't have a picture of it in my series, but once the milk is coagulated, the curds are formed, then something called a Swiss harp which is a device about like that and it's got wires in it and you pull that across the kettle and it cuts the curd into little cubes. I don't have a photo of that. 

That's the important part of the process. So with the Swiss harp we've cut the curd into these little cubes and now some poor Joe, I 'spect he's last hire, I don't know. He gets to get -- that water is hot, it's whey of course. He's down into the whey and the curds have settled to the bottom and they whey is on top. And he is getting what's called a dipping cloth underneath the curd, so they're going to lift it out of the kettle. Now, you can quite see it in the picture, but there is a metal thing there with a "T" and his feet are caught under that. I suppose one of the dirtiest tricks in the world, and Fritz could tell you about that is to just sort of disturb that a little bit and he takes a header into the kettle. Okay, now we're going to follow that through and he really gets his nose into his work you see he's right into it. And now he's, they've got the cloth under the curd. Now mind you, that curd is going to weigh more than 200 pounds. 

There's a lot of whey yet in it so it was roughly 200 pounds of curd plus the whey that's still in it and so now we're going to hook that to a device, a metal tackle block and lift it literally lift it out of that kettle leaving behind the whey. And do you see the whey draining out the bottom of that hunk of curd? And the guy watching, he sees something that's funny, I don't know what he's looking at but. And you see again, see the whey just running out of that thing. And they're going to move it over to that table and now remember those hoops we saw before? Now he's packing, putting that curd into that ring and what they're going to do now is press more of the whey out of the curd and form it into that historic wheel that we know -- that identifies Swiss cheese. And that's, there's that lid that you see in the front of the photo will go on top and then there is a force pushed down on it and the whey comes running out and it's captured in a pail on the end and then it's turned and it's pressed again and it's pressed overnight. It's pressed a lot. They try to get as much of the whey out of it is possible. Fritz is that you in your mother's arms? 

- No, it wasn't. 
- That's not you. 
- That's not me. 
- Once the Swiss wheels have been pressed and the whey is out of them, the wheels are put in a brine tank which is salt and water, and the salt helps to form the rhind on the cheese. So, it's in a brine tank for a time. Once the cheese is out of the brine tank and ready to go on the shelves, that chap on the left is an inspector, and every wheel of Swiss cheese was graded, A-B-C-D. And marked. The grade was based on the size of the eye -- and I'm going to talk about how the eyes were formed, don't let me forget to do that because that was one of the things that some of you I know are interested in. The size of the eye, the taste the smell, that happened with every, every one of the wheels. He's using a little device called a trier that he pushes in and pulls out a little bit of Swiss cheese. 

The grades are themselves interesting. The "D" which is the worst grade, the lowest grade, if a Swiss cheese wheel does not have any holes or eyes as they're called, it's called blind cheese. If the holes are way too big that's a problem as well. So there is a right size for the holes. And then the wheels are stacked in the curing room and they are turned and washed two to three times a week to remove any mold that develops. And now remember what I said? They weigh -- these wheels weigh from 180 to 200 pounds and these men are constantly flipping those big wheels of cheese and washing them. It's really quite phenomenal. Now, here we have the finished product with the holes. How do the holes get into the cheese? 

I talk to kids often and they have all kinds of interesting ideas. One little kid said well mice like cheese. Yeah right. No, the holes come from -- by the way, cheese is -- once it's made, it's still living. The process of curing and changing is constantly going on. That's not just Swiss cheese that's whatever kind of cheese you want to talk about. It's not a dead product. It's always changing. And those bacterium, that special bacterium that I mentioned early on. One of the things that it does is create carbon dioxide, and the carbon dioxide creates bubbles, and when the bubbles burst you get a hole. 

And so that's how Swiss cheese gets its holes. A couple of more things about the Jaggi cheese factory, a fellow by the name of -- a Norwegian fellow by the name of Ingbretson painted this mural on the side of the cheese factory which is kind of a way of reminding people of the Swiss background for Jaggi and there is the fine picture of horse and buggy. Now I want to do a little bit of contemporary stuff and then have you ask some questions. Where are we in cheesemaking in Wisconsin today and how have we changed? To put all of this into some context. We had -- the years across the bottom, 1981 to 2006 we had 300+ cheese factories in 1981. Today we have roughly 120 some although, those of you who are following the press. Almost every year now there's a new little cheese factory opening. They're farm based. There is a whole new thing going on in artisan cheesemaking. 

And with the number of cheese plants going down the amount of cheese we make in Wisconsin continues to go up. We're at 2.5 billion pounds of cheese made a year. That's a lot of cheese no matter how you look at it. This is the US production of cheese and it shows where Wisconsin ranks. Every so often people come up and they say well I see we have lost out to California. Well, not in cheesemaking, not by a long shot. In fact, California is having some real water problems. Sort of the opposite kind of problem we're having. Anyway, 25.9% in 2006 of the cheese in the nation was manufactured here in Wisconsin. California about 23% and then you can see what the rest of them are. 

Some wise guy the other day said well what state's that all others, they seem to be the leader. Now today, things have really changed. Swiss cheese, and I've got to mention that at one time in Green County which was and still is a county that makes a lot of cheese. They not only made a lot of Swiss cheese, they made a lot of Limburger cheese. That was the center for those two kinds of cheese. And cheddar, cheddar cheese which does not come from Wisconsin initially, it comes from England. Someone really gave me the business the other day. It's from England. We made in 2006, 26.1% of all of our cheese was cheddar, but look at mozzarella. Mozzarella was just almost nothing when the Swiss cheese making was at its height. 

And why mozzarella? Pizza, pizza. And it just keeps going up. Other American cheese would be colby and monterey jack and those kinds of cheeses, and the other Italian would be parmesan, asiago, those kinds. And all the others of which we see more and more other kinds of cheese being produced. Here's another way of looking at how things have changed. From 1996 to 2006 where cheddar was 37.8% of our cheesemaking 10 years ago. That I find kind of interesting. Here's another kind of a myth. So many people say to me well all of our dairying now is done at farms where there are more than 500 cows in the barn. 

And we do have 250 dairy herds that have 500 or more cows. There is one going up I think in Kiwanis County with 7,000 cows which would be our largest dairy herd in the state. But still, 6100 of our dairy herds have less than 100 cows. That makes us dramatically different from California. And if you multiply the 6100 by the number of cows, that's the largest block of dairy cows that we have in the state. Not the 500+ head. Here is something that has been going on in the last few years that's really interesting. The University of Wisconsin where I was a professor of agriculture for many years. University of Wisconsin has developed over a few years ago a master cheesemaking program. And that master cheesemaking program was designed not for beginning cheesemakers but for those who have had considerable experience already and to help them expand their ideas into new kinds of cheese. 

Now whomever you talk with, we are at the point now where Wisconsin has as many as 400 different kinds of cheese, and these specialty cheesemakers and they're scattered pretty much around the state, a sizeable percentage of them are graduates of this master cheese program, are making these very interesting specialty cheeses. If you go down the street from where we are right now, about two blocks, there is a little cheese store that opened about a year ago. And they have a lot of those different kinds of cheeses. I was there signing books a couple of years ago. So that's an interesting trend. For those who would want to say "look, our cheese production our dairy industry is on the skids and it's Idaho and Arizona and Texas and California that's taking over." Our cheesemakers, the innovative people that they are have said "no, we're going to try something different." I also wrote a book on the history of beer making. And I say that because there's a direct connection between what's happened in the beer making industry with the huge breweries compared to the huge cheese factories. Now we're seeing specialty beers, craft beers developing all over the place along with these specialty cheeses. 

So, it's a very interesting thing that's happening in agriculture. So I want to come back to Casper Jaggi who is the person featured in this book and invite you to page through the book and learn some more about what is was like to live in a cheese factory. I've got to tell you just one little story that I have in here that's kind of fun. Those who operated cheese factories were forever challenged by their farmer patrons on how they tested their milk. And I forgot to tell you that milk was purchased from the farmer based on the test of the milk. The higher the test of the milk the more the farmer got paid. So the farmer was always very very concerned about what his test was. Well Casper Jaggi, he was no different than lots of cheesemakers, he didn't even bother to take a sample of milk to test it on Friday or Saturday because he knew the women were all skimming cream to use for their baking over the weekend. One farmer came storming into the cheese plant just furious that his test was not what it ought to be. And it just so happened that they were dumping his milk into that receiving tank that I showed you early on and what came out was a fancy cup, a coffee cup. 

And Casper said "what's this?" And the farmer said "that's my wife's cup." And that took care of the argument about what was going to happen to the test. Questions? Yes sir. 
- Can you tell us a little more about the poor grades and how it affected the price and use of the cheese? 
- Sure. There was a special marking used too if I remember it correctly. "A" was one mark, "B" made a "T." "C" made an "I." 

I think you know all of this don't you. "D" made -- a "D" was like a cat in the cradle thing, whatever you do with the four lines. The A Grade, B Grade, those were, especially the A Grade -- that's prime, and that's where the price would be best, and "D" may have been even ground up and used in processed cheese on the other end and then it was priced accordingly. Yeah. 
- Is Green County still the leader in cheese production? 
- Green County makes a lot of cheese. They are not the leader in Swiss cheese production that they once were, not at all. There are a few of these artisan cheesemakers who are going back to making Swiss cheese in copper kettles and it's wonderful that they're doing that. Swiss Cheese along with all other kinds of cheese in the huge plants, cheese plants that have developed around the country, they began making it in vats. They didn't bother with the kettles. 

Cheddar is made in vats, colby, all the other cheeses are made in vats. Swiss is just unique in that it was made in these kettles. But Green County, Monroe is still, what do they call their high school teams? They're the cheesemakers aren't they? Really. And if you haven't been to Monroe's Cheese Days -- it's every other year -- it's just a wonderful thing. I'm speaking there this year. It's just a wonderful thing to go. You all know about Monroe don't you, the big courthouse on the square, and it's just a wonderful town, and what's the name of that little restaurant right on the side? Yes, just get a big schooner of dark beer and if you're really into Limburger you can buy some there but you certainly can get a big slice of aged Swiss. 

Put that on some brown bread and a big red onion slice. You don't have to worry about folks crowding too close to you for some time. Anybody else have a question? 
- I guess everybody else knows but me, but when is Cheese Days? 
- Third weekend in September. 
- So I didn't miss it yet? 
- No, you haven't missed it yet. I mean I hope we haven't because I'm supposed to speak there. It's just a really fun thing. There are booths all around. 

They demonstrate old fashioned -- at least they have, Swiss cheesemaking. Another thing, let me suggest -- go down to Monroe and there is a cheesemaking museum in Monroe and there they have Swiss cheese equipment and Limburger cheese equipment and it's a great place to find out what it was all about with pictures of cheesemakers all around the walls. When I wrote the book "Cheese: the Making of a Wisconsin Tradition" I camped out there. They've done videotapes of all the old cheesemakers in the area. That's in Monroe. It's just a wonderful place to spend an afternoon. It's in an old depot. What's the name of the road going by it? 
- 69 going towards Freeport. 
- 69, it's right on the side of the road. 

It's about 2/3 of the way through town on the right. Other questions? Yes, ma'am. 
- What kinds of cheese do they make in Idaho? 
- Well my guess is that they're making mozzarella and cheddar. 
- The same kinds? 
- Yeah. Well, that's what's on the market. Now cheddar cheese for those of you who may not be aware cheddar cheese is what you find at McDonalds and Burger King on a cheeseburger. Lots of cheese is sold to the fast food market and cheddar is a lot of it. 

Swiss cheese has become a specialty cheese. How many of you like Swiss cheese? How many of you like aged Swiss cheese? How many like really aged Swiss cheese? How many of you like 6-year old cheddar? Isn't that wonderful stuff? It just sort of crumbles. Other question? Yes. Way in the back. 

- From the time the milk gets dumped out to the time it goes into a wheel, what period of time is that? 
- Not very long. Let's see, it's probably the next day. Fritz, is that right? 
- When the milk comes in, as soon as a you get enough milk in the holding tank to make a wheel of cheese, it's put into the kettle to start processing. 
- But the wheel is, by the next day there is a wheel. It's pressed overnight. What I was going to say -- and I wanted to check with Fritz because he's going to tell me afterwards if I screwed this up you see, that's why he's sitting down here in the front row, and I invited him to do that. The next day it's in a wheel. 
- But you didn't get paid -- when you sold Swiss you didn't get paid until a month and a half after. 

- That's right. Exactly. Here's a good point. It's got to go one through an aging process for several weeks before its sold. He makes an excellent point. Six weeks in the summer, minimum and eight weeks in the winter for aging. Yes. 
- Who did the Jaggis sell their cheese to? 
- Most cheese was sold to distributors who then sold to other people. How far would that distribution be? 

Do you know that answer to that Fritz? 
- If you can back up to where those tubs were. Right at the beginning. 
- I know where it is. I'm pretty slow at -- you're telling the story a lot faster than I can run this thing. 
- It went in tubs that we seen underneath that roof there that'd hold five wheels of Swiss cheese and then they would nail the lid together to the sides of the tub and then they would roll them out of the cellar across into a railroad car and they would go to Chicago. Charlie Zercher from Chicago would come and buy the cheese and also it went to Monroe for cold storage and that. But most of it went into Chicago by rail. 
- There it is. 
- Those are shipping tubs and around the corner there on the dock is where they put them all in there. 

There used to be a ramp that went from the first storage door there over to that deck and that's how they got ready. 
- One of the interesting parts of cheese history in Wisconsin is how the railroads were used. If you go to Monticello has a cheese depot. It has been resurrected now. It's really nice to see all that. Yeah. 
- On that same subject, when cheese was sent to distributors, did Casper Jaggi get the glory of his name on there, or Brodhead Cheese Company or was it marketed under many names? 
- It was just Wisconsin with a factory number and a date. 
- Yeah the connection, even then there was a connection though to the factory number so you could trace it back. But the idea of getting some notoriety for your cheese, that was -- Wisconsin was getting was being recognized, but not the individual. 

One more question. Yes, the way back. 
- I grew up in the little town of Mayville. We lived very near to a cheese factory. What we would always see at family get-togethers was aged brick. It was very good. 
- What? Oh, brick, yeah. Well, brick -- see there are two cheeses that are Wisconsin originals, brick which comes out of Dodge County and what's the other one? Colby. 

And where does colby come from? Not the city, not the city, it's from the Township of Colby in Clark County. I was just up there the other day. One more. 
- What are the by-products of whey? 
- By-products of whey today. It's used in the baking industry. They use a lot of whey, dry it and use it in the baking industry. Candy. It's a very valuable product. 

One more. 
- Does all the flavor in Swiss cheese come from the copper in the tubs? 
- No, I would say. Remember I said early on that there was a controversy that there was part of the nutty flavor of Swiss cheese was imparted due to the copper, but that -- I'm not so sure that was accurate. We're out of time. We're out of time, and thank you all so very much for coming. I appreciate it.