Heber Valley Artisan Cheese

The shop at 920 River Road in Midway is red and built in the style of a barn, and it sits among green pastures with mountains beyond. The counter serves grilled cheese sandwiches and Aggie Ice Cream. The shelves hold milk and meat from the farm, cheese curds, jams, fudge, and goods from other valley producers. Behind the shop is the Kohler dairy, with 150-plus cows on 102 acres, and the creamery where their milk is made into cheese. The business is Heber Valley Artisan Cheese, and the farm store and its events go by the name Kohler Creamery. The land itself has been called Canyon View Farm, and since 2021 the Albert Kohler Legacy Farm.

Utah Life places the farm between the Wasatch and Uinta ranges, with the Provo River to the east and Midway’s downtown a little over a mile off. Pasture once surrounded the dairy on every side. Now homes do.

The hayride to the calf barn

Tours leave at 11 a.m. every day except Sunday. Guests gather at the shop, climb onto a trailer pulled by a tractor, and ride out to the barns on hay bales. The first stop is the calves, which range from one day to ten weeks old. Utah Life says they come up to suck on fingers, tug at shirts, and angle for ear scratches. Heber Valley Life, writing in 2023, counted 30 to 40 calves on a usual day. It said the wagon stays with them about half an hour and the whole tour runs an hour and a half to two hours.

From the calves the route goes to the feeding barns and the milking parlor, where the cows are milked by robots. Heber Valley Life described the machines massaging the cows while they gather data on each animal’s production, nutrition, and health and send notifications to the farmers. The last barn on the circuit is the old hand-milking barn, used from 1929 until 2017.

The cheese plant is not on the tour. The farm calls it an active food preparation area and keeps it closed to visitors under food-safety rules. A 2019 Heber Valley Life article described a large window in the market through which customers could watch cheese being made.

The case and the cave

The family makes more than 30 styles. Sharp cheddar is Caralee Kohler’s favorite. Heather Kohler developed a wheel rubbed with Tahitian vanilla bean, which Russ Kohler says tastes like ice cream that never melts. Several cheddars rotate through the case: lemon sage, mustard herb, Smoked Jalapeño Bacon, Cracked Pepper and Chive, and Tomato Basil, which is pressed with sun-dried tomatoes and basil. They share the case with Cascade Raw and with Wasatch Back Jack, the family’s first gold-medal winner. Juustoleipa, pronounced oo-stay-lee-pa, is a Finnish bread cheese made to be fried, grilled, or baked.

According to the farm, it takes about 10 pounds of milk to make a pound of cheese. Curds are best eaten the day they are made, before they are ever refrigerated. Curds pressed overnight into wheels become cheddar and go to the “cave,” the aging room. Mild cheddar stays at least two months and extra sharp at least four years. Utah Life describes hundreds of wheels on rows of shelving in the chilly room, with the bite of aging cheddar in the damp air. Some wheels stay up to ten years, and when that article ran a 15-year release was in the works.

Tastings in the creamery offer cheeses not yet on the market. In the fall of 2026 they were scheduled for Friday evenings at 6 p.m. on October 9, November 13, and December 11. Mozzarella and burrata classes run monthly, with a mozzarella class set for October 23, 2026. The farm also teaches charcuterie boards, and Utah Life mentions fondue nights.

October on River Road

Through October 2026 the farm runs its Fall Festival every day but Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The grounds hold a hay maze, a hay slide, bounce houses, a jump pad, corn pits, archery, pumpkin bowling, ring toss, yard games, and pumpkins. After dark comes the Heber Valley Haunted Hayride, which the farm advertises as the spookiest hayride in Utah, along with a Haunted Maze.

Other events fill the rest of the year. Tractor Days, which the farm calls the one time a year visitors may climb all over its equipment, ran September 18 and 19 in 2026. In spring the Farm Baby Celebration fills the fields. The 2023 event brought baby goats, cows, horses, sheep, rabbits, llamas, alpacas, zebu calves, and baby fish. Farmers and ranchers from around the valley helped visitors pet, hold, and feed the animals, and VIP ticket holders could join goat yoga. During Midway’s Swiss Days, the creamery promises ice cream, cows, and cheese.

Gotlib Kohler and the farm bought in 1929

The family traces its roots to Swiss pioneers. Its own website disagrees with itself on when they came. The About page says they settled the Heber Valley in the 1870s and often said Mount Timpanogos reminded them of their snowy Alps. A blog post on the same site puts the migration in the 1830s. Heber Valley Life names Gotlib Kohler, Grant Kohler’s great-grandfather, as a cheesemaker in Switzerland who came to Midway as one of the area’s first settlers. Grant’s grandfather worked in the original Midway creamery as a teenager.

That grandfather bought the farm in 1929, according to Heber Valley Life. The family’s site says only that the farm has been theirs since the 1920s. Another family moved out when the land changed hands: Norma Martin went with her parents and siblings to a little farmstead after they sold their original farm to the Kohlers. The Kohlers say they owned the first tractor in the valley in 1930.

The valley once held more than 130 dairies, by the family’s count. Heber Valley Life wrote in 2019 that only two remained in production. Utah Life reports that the Kohlers saw Midway land values rising past anything a farmer could earn selling milk wholesale. Industrial dairies added to the competition, and the family began to wonder how they would afford to feed their cows. “Small dairy farmers needed to change how they did business in order to survive,” Grant Kohler told Heber Valley Life.

“No joke”

Grant’s son Russ went to Utah State University to become an engineer and built a career at it. Utah Life says the long hours kept him away from his wife and six children. Grant’s account in Heber Valley Life adds an instruction of his own: “I told Russ he needed to work somewhere else and see if this was what he really wanted.” After four years away, Russ and his wife, Heather, came back to the valley. Utah Life calls him the fourth generation to run the place.

It was Grant who first suggested cheese. Four generations had raised dairy cows without ever turning the milk into anything else. Russ went back to Utah State for training, and the family enrolled in the university’s cheesemaking program. Russ’s sisters Whitney and Amber led the cheesemaking team. Heather built the packaging and order-filling system. Their mother, Caralee, became master taster and peacemaker, keeping her children working together. “The initial investment was a lot more than we thought,” Grant said.

The shop opened on April 1, 2011. “I like to tell people, no joke!” Russ told Utah Life. It sold out the first day. In the beginning, a few hundred dollars in sales made a good day, and the creamery sold a few hundred pounds of cheese a week. Utah Life later put weekly sales at about 3,000 pounds. Early on, a batch of cheddar came out softer and milder, with only a hint of cheddar bite. The family stretched it like mozzarella and sold it as “cheddarella.” People still ask for it, and the family admits it does not know how to make it again.

The first award came in 2013. The Kohlers moved from the Utah Cheese Awards to the American Cheese Awards and then to the World Cheese Awards. In 2022 their Lemon Sage Cheddar won gold at the world level, and it has placed every year since. In 2021 the farm was protected through Utah Open Lands. Heber Valley Life called the conservation easement the family’s way of giving back to the valley and keeping its open space.

Grant Kohler died in 2023. He had chaired Swiss Days and served 22 years as a volunteer EMT and member of Search and Rescue with the Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office. “I can’t tell you how many times we pulled off the work we were doing on the farm to help someone who had a flat tire, broken machine or flooded basement,” Russ said.