Hi folks!
Just got back from 2 weeks holiday in Austria (The Carinth part of the country). Visited a farm at an altitute of 1560 mtr (about a mile above sea level), where they make cheese every day from the raw milk of their own brown Alpine cows. Tasted and bought some very interesting Camembert like cheese and soft fresh cheese with herbs (already finished the last one….). They also make a traditional mountain cheese (which they call “Alm cheese”) that has a natural rind that is a bit Muenster like but milder, but I didn’t buy that one because I thought the pieces where too big and expensive.
Unfortunately it was impossible to speak to the farmer and his wife and son because the cheese-making area was divided from the visitors area and they were very busy. But in the visitors area were recipes and pictures on the wall and I made pictures of all recipes.
I will translate them and convert all units to US system and share them with you, together with some pictures.

First picture is the view standing in front of the farm at Tressdorfer Alm.

Awesome!!!
Glad u had a great time.

So exciting! What a great trip.

Finally I had time to sort out some of my holiday pictures. First one here is the kettle with whey. The fire is made with wood. Second and third are mountain cheeses without mould, ready to be turned.
I started translating the recipes, although I now noticed that they don’t mention exact volumes….

And finally a picture of the mountain cheeses (or Alm cheese) and the fresh cheeses with herbs in the storage.

Thanks! great pics. Those presses look handy and small

Yes, I forgot to tell about the presses. As far as I could see (working area was separated by a window from the visitors area) the pressed worked on compressed air. One compressor for all six (or five?). I also have pictures of the turning, which was quite impressive: Upper cheese cloth was replaced, the mould was replaced, then he took a firm grip of the bottom cheese cloth and with one big jerk the cheese was flipped over. He was almost losing his pants with this…

LOL, adds to the whole fun

In my first post on this subject I promised recipes from Austria. It indeed turned out to be incomplete, so I’m not going to post them as recipes but in this topic as description about how they make their cheese there. I hope you don’t mind. I certainly want to try to make cheese using these descriptions and when I have good results I will still post the recipes…
Here the first description:

Per day they use about 50 liter (13 gallon) of whole milk from selected cows for the production of Alm Camembert.
The milk is warmed to about 40 degrees Celsius (104 F) and Penicillium camemberti and a starter are added.
As you can see on the picture, the milk is warmed in a square bin in which a square curd cutter is already present.
After a while the rennet is added and in about 40 minutes the curd is ready and is cut into 2 cm (0.8 inch) big cubes.
The curd is then gently stirred to stimulate the whey to separate.
The curd is let to rest for a while and then a part of the whey is removed (I saw this happen and it’s about a third) and replaced with warm water. (After the curd was stirred again I noticed that the temperature was around 45 degrees Celcius (113 F) , so I expect they use a thermophylic starter).
After a couple of minutes, without further draining, the curd is put into the moulds.
Without any pressing, the moulds will be turned 5-6 times during the next day.
After 2 hours in the brine (not so common for Camembert type cheeses?), the cheeses will be stored in 90% rel. humidity and after a couple of days the white mold will start to cover the outside. 

I bought two of them in their shop and they were firmer then a “normal” Camembert, but with a good flavour and taste…

I like the presses too. I have wondered what a commercial cheese press would look like, obviously you would need a lot of them. I assume that the whey runs out onto the table and off in a drain somewhere.

That’s true, the whey is running free from the table, so is it doing when they fill the moulds for the Camembert and it’s running down a drain in the floor. I expect it’s stored somewhere, because I didn’t see it running down the hill