Helvetia Creamery

In the late 1800s, the Grossen family left the Berner Oberland in Switzerland and crossed an ocean to settle in a small Oregon community called Helvetia — named by Swiss immigrants, in Latin, for "Little Switzerland." They brought their Brown Swiss cows. They brought their recipes. And they brought Bergkäse, the alpine cheese they'd been making in the mountains of home.

For decades, the Grossens made cheese in Helvetia and sold it in Portland, traveling dirt roads by horse to reach the city. They sold commercially until 1937, when the operation wound down. But the cows stayed. The knowledge stayed. And a century later, Dave Grossen — the sixth generation to farm this land — is making the same cheese his great-grandfather made, from the milk of the same breed of cattle, on the same Oregon Century Farm.

The reason Brown Swiss milk matters is specific: it contains the ideal balance of protein, lactose, and butterfat for alpine cheesemaking. The cows that Dave milks today — Ellie, Juni, Attie, and Edel — are direct descendants of the herd that arrived with his ancestors from Switzerland.

What comes out is Bergkäse — aged Swiss alpine cheese, hard and washed-rind, the kind that takes months to develop properly. You can't rush the aging. You can't replicate the milk. You can only tend the animals well, follow the recipe faithfully, and wait. When you taste it, you're tasting something that has been traveling from the Swiss mountains to an Oregon field and back into a wheel of cheese for over a hundred years.