Travel Tuesday: Visiting The Barlow in Sebastopol

Continuing from my last post where I was on a tour with the Artisan Cheese Festival in California, after a cheese seminar with a blind tasting and visiting Bohemian Creamery, we headed over to The Barlow.  It is a walkable area in downtown Sebastopol that is composed of more then 30 tasting rooms, restaurants, and stores all by local makers in several industrial buildings that used to be the Barlow apple production facility, now re-purposed. We would have our last 3 stops out of the 5 on the tour here while visiting the Barlow in Sebastopol – a lunch showcasing cheese, visiting another cheesemaker, and tasting at a distillery.

zazu kitchen + farm

First, we had lunch at zazu kitchen + farm. Chef Duskie Estes, a regular guest on the Food Network (ad alum of Tom Douglas’s Palace Kitchen in Seattle), served us a meal where every course included cheese from the 2 cheesemakers we were visiting for this tour, as well as other locally sourced ingredients.

Starter of their signature black pig bacon caramel popcorn (they are known for their pigs and bacon here) for the table.

The bacon also appeared in the official first course featuring cheese, a Black pig bacon wrapped date with Wm. Cofield blue cheese, saba paired with North Coast Brewing Old Stock Ale (which also went excellently with the bacon popcorn). Wm Cofield is one of the two cheesemakers we are going to visit on the tour, and we are scheduled to tour them right after this lunch so more on this shortly.

The main course as we chatted at communal tables with fellow tour participants was a Bellwether ricotta raviolo with artichokes, white truffle butter, backyard fava leaf paired with J. Bucher Rose of Pinot Noir, RRV 2017.

Then, dessert, which was my favorite of the cheese courses of this lunch, of Bohemian Creamery’s Bodacious cheese with a red wine pear, toasted buttered bread paired with Bucher Pinot Noir RRV 2014. The wine here did a fantastic job of bringing out the red wine pear, while the Bohemian Bodacious cheese is a great compliment and contrast to the bread and to the pear and wine. It also was wonderful to see the Bodacious cheese which we had seen at the Bohemian Creamery that we had just toured now in the professional atmosphere of in a dish crafted by a chef in a restaurant.

Wm. Cofield Cheesemakers

After lunch, take a short stroll literally across the way to Wm. Cofield Cheesemakers.

Keith Adams and Rob Hunter are behind one of California’s newest creameries, Wm. Cofield Cheesemakers. After pursuing different career paths, these two college friends reunited to produce classic English-style cheeses. Since they are still new, they are still limited to producing mainly 3 kinds of cheeses – fresh cheese curds (inspired by Keith’s time in Minnesota), a clothbound cheddar, and their Stilton-esque blue cheese. In their cheese case they also offer other cheese from the US under the criteria of cheese Keith wishes he had made.

Keith took us on a tour of the cheesemaking room and walked us through the process. Unlike the Bohemian Creamery that we had visited earlier, the facilities at Wm. Cofield Cheesemakers are more modern (such as having automatic press for the cheese in the molds) and seemed more industrial and ready to scale to much larger professional production in the future.

When they built their tasting room, they specificaly added windows to showcase the cheesemaking process tovisitors, and there is also a window into their aging room. Our tour did us one better by letting us into the aging room for a little bit of time. You can see how different it is aging these British style cheeses versus what I saw with the cheeses from Bohemian Creamery!

Spirit Works Distillery

We finished our tour on probably the weakest note, what was advertised as a tour with Timo and Ashby Marshall, the husband and wife team behind Spirit Works Distillery. Here, they make most uniquely a sloe gin, as well as vodka, wheat and rye whiskey, and regular and barrel aged gin. Most distilling tasting rooms I have visited have been very simple, and I really enjoyed the feel of the Spirit Works Tasting Room that showed off the contrast of wood and glass bottles.

Unfortunately, as we found out when we arrived, they had no idea our group was coming. Ashby rallied to give us a talk on the background of Barlow and each of the individual distilling processes for their vodka, gin, and whiskey in their beautiful copper combination distiller.

The last 10 minutes of our hour tour were for very quick tasting by their barrel areas, where they had quickly set up two tables with 4 bottles each with tasting pours. The unfortunate side effect of this hurried tasting though is that we missed out on hearing a more guided tasting of what makes their spirits special. Besides tasting their sloe gin and thinking that is unusual, there was nothing special I learned or noticed about their vodka, regular gin, or whiskey.

Since they also offer a second kind of vodka (with a green label, but I don’t even ever hear what the difference was though reading their tasting menu I realize one is made with wheat and another with rye), and some rye and barrel aged whiskeys, this could have been a better educational opportunity for us to taste the difference and compare and contrast. But that didn’t happen, and I didn’t walk away with any sense besides the fact they make sloe gin what differentiates them from other craft distilleries I know, and I feel like I’ve gotten a better sense of products at tasting booth at a food or drink event then actually visiting this tasting room on a tour. Pretty disappointing.

Here’s  a shot though of their products we saw in the tasting room before we were taken to the distilling area and the barrel area where we had our tastings.

   

Still, I do think the cheese tour I went on with Bohemian Creamery and the seminar, both of which I wrote about in a previous post, was an incredibly unique experience to have and I am glad I had it. I also was grateful to learn about the Barlow area – I may want to come back and wander the various merchants on my own one day in the future – I noticed at least 2 breweries!

Believe it or not, my cheese Friday is not over yet – after a couple hours break after this tour where my sister and I had a bubble tea and checked into our hotel, we then went to The Best Bite – A Tribute to First Responders. This evening event brought together Cheesemakers, Chefs and Cheesemongers in a Best Bite Competition while paying tribute to first responders who risked their lives during California’s destructive fire storms in October last year. Stay tuned to my next post for a look at this event.

Now that you have probably read both part 1 and part 2 of my Artisan Cheese Tour, which portion of the tour stops do you think you would have liked the most? The seminar? Which cheesemaker? Or lunch? Or the distillery?