Montgomery's Cheddar Review: The Raw-Milk Benchmark

Ask a serious cheesemonger to name the benchmark for traditional clothbound cheddar, and Montgomery's is one of the first names out of their mouth. The farm at North Cadbury, Somerset, has been in the Montgomery family since 1911, and it is now on its third generation — still making raw-milk cheddar the hard way, at a time when almost everyone else in the industry chose the easier path. That reputation didn't come from marketing or from a Royal Warrant. It came from decades of chefs and cheesemongers tasting it against the alternatives and consistently reaching the same conclusion.

The Story

The Montgomery family farm at North Cadbury dates to 1911, which places its founding right at the edge of living memory for the last generation who could have known the farm's earliest years first-hand. That's a useful marker for how recent, in the scale of things, this heritage actually is compared with some of the multi-century businesses elsewhere in this directory — and it makes what happened over the following three decades all the more significant, because the farm was still relatively young, without the deep institutional inertia of a centuries-old operation, when the pressures of the Second World War arrived and gave every reason to change course.

Three generations later, the farm is still in the same family's hands, still making cheddar the same demanding way, in the same corner of Somerset. That continuity through a period of genuine national food-supply crisis is precisely why professional cheesemongers and other cheesemakers treat Montgomery's as the reference point against which other traditional cheddars are measured — it isn't simply old, it specifically survived the exact historical moment that ended most of its competitors.

What Makes It Different

Montgomery's cheddar is raw-milk and clothbound — two features that, together, put it in a small minority of British cheddar production. Raw milk means the cheese is made without pasteurisation, preserving the complex bacterial activity that gives farmhouse cheese its depth and variation. Clothbinding — wrapping the cheese in cloth (traditionally lard-dressed muslin) rather than sealing it in plastic or wax — allows the cheese to breathe as it matures, developing a natural rind and a more complex flavour over months of ageing.

Industrial cheddar, by contrast, is almost always pasteurised for consistency and shelf stability, and block-matured in plastic, which speeds up production but produces a flatter, more uniform result. Montgomery's method takes longer, costs more, and carries more risk — but it is the method that produces the cheddar most professional palates regard as the real reference point for what the cheese is supposed to taste like.

The risk element is worth spelling out, because it's a large part of why so few producers still do this. Raw milk introduces variability that pasteurisation is specifically designed to eliminate — batch-to-batch differences driven by season, pasture, and the specific bacterial population present at any given time. A pasteurised, standardised process removes almost all of that variability in exchange for a predictable, repeatable product. Montgomery's accepts that variability as the price of a more complex result, which is a commercially riskier position to hold than it might sound, because it means no two batches are ever guaranteed to taste identical, and a producer has to be confident enough in their process to stand behind that inconsistency as a feature rather than a flaw.

Why Surviving WWII Rationing Matters

The Second World War very nearly ended traditional farmhouse cheddar-making in Britain altogether. Wartime regulation pushed dairy farms hard toward producing a standardised "Government Cheddar" for rationing purposes, and many farmhouse cheesemakers — unable to justify the lower yield and higher risk of traditional raw-milk methods under wartime pressure — stopped for good. Most never restarted.

Montgomery's kept going. That's not a footnote; it's the reason a raw-milk clothbound cheddar tradition exists at all for later generations to inherit, rather than being a rediscovered or reconstructed craft. The Montgomery family's decision to keep making cheddar the traditional way through the 1940s is directly why, decades later, their cheese is regarded as the benchmark rather than a revival.

This distinction — surviving continuously versus being revived later — matters more than it might first appear. A number of traditional food crafts that disappeared during the mid-twentieth century have since been reconstructed by enthusiasts working from historical records, old recipes, or oral history, and some of those revivals are genuinely excellent. But a revival is, by definition, working from documentation rather than living practice — there is always a gap, however small, between what the records describe and what was actually done day to day. Montgomery's never had that gap, because the practice was never interrupted long enough to need reconstructing.

What You're Really Buying

A wheel of Montgomery's costs a genuine premium over industrial cheddar, and it should — raw milk, cloth-binding, and months of careful maturing all cost more in time, risk, and yield than a plastic-wrapped, pasteurised block produced on a schedule. What you're buying is the cheese other cheesemakers use to check their own work against, made by a family who chose not to stop when wartime Britain gave them every reason to.

That premium also reflects genuine loss during production that an industrial process doesn't have to absorb. Clothbound cheeses lose moisture as they breathe and mature over months, and the natural rind that develops has to be trimmed away before sale — both of which reduce the final saleable weight compared with a plastic-sealed block that retains its exact weight from the day it's wrapped. None of that cost is hidden or arbitrary; it's the direct, physical consequence of choosing a slower, more traditional maturing method over a faster, more efficient one.

Pros:

• Raw-milk, clothbound production — the reference standard most serious cheddar is judged against.
• Three generations on the same North Cadbury farm since 1911.
• Survived WWII-era rationing pressures that ended most other traditional cheddar-making.

Cons:

• Significantly pricier than industrial cheddar, reflecting genuinely higher production cost and risk.
• Raw-milk cheese requires more careful handling and storage than pasteurised alternatives.
• Batch-to-batch variation means the exact flavour can differ slightly, which some shoppers used to uniform supermarket cheddar may find unfamiliar.

Why Cheesemongers Trust the Name

Serious cheesemongers and chefs treat Montgomery's as a shorthand — when they want to describe another producer's cheddar, "closer to Montgomery's" or "not quite Montgomery's" functions as an understood point of comparison in a way few other cheddars can claim. That kind of trade reputation isn't built through marketing; it's built over decades of consistent quality being recognised by people whose job is to taste hundreds of competing cheeses and know precisely which ones hold up.

It also means Montgomery's carries a responsibility that goes beyond its own commercial success. As the reference point for what raw-milk clothbound cheddar should taste like, its continued existence helps preserve a shared professional understanding of the category itself — something that would be far harder to maintain, or even define, if the benchmark producer stopped operating and the trade had nothing consistent left to measure new entrants against.

The Verdict

Montgomery's is proof that the best version of a British staple survived not because it was protected, but because one family refused to take the easier, wartime-sanctioned path when almost everyone else did. That's the quiet heroism behind a lot of Britain's surviving food heritage — not grand gestures, just a refusal to stop, made at a moment in history when stopping would have been the entirely reasonable, forgivable choice.

Read the wider case for protecting producers like this in British Real Food Heritage.

Related: Barber's Cheddar Review | Appleby's Cheshire Review