MouCo Cheese Company

MouCo Cheese Company keeps no shop counter at 1401 Duff Drive in northeast Fort Collins. Visitors come by appointment, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, when the vats are running. The company’s tour page puts the cheesemaking window between 8:00 and 11:00 a.m. and the walk at 60 to 90 minutes. Its FAQ says about 90. Groups run to 18. A guide tells the company’s history, leads through the production and aging areas, and ends with a tasting. The production floor is warm and humid, which the owners call “part of the real cheesemaking environment.” The building is not wheelchair accessible, and a walker can manage only part of it. Tours are generally free. The company says it hopes guests take some cheese home.

The equipment is mostly German. The Coloradoan reported in 2017 that production is modeled on the Käserei Champignon factory in Kempten, Germany, once led by Franz Halbreiter, father of co-owner Birgit Halbreiter, though MouCo runs at a much smaller scale.

From the dairy to the ripening room

The milk comes in on Chuck, the company’s milk truck. A few times a week Chuck leaves early in the morning on an 11-mile run to the dairy and brings back raw milk. Accounts name the dairy differently. Profiles from 2016 and 2017 give La Luna Dairy of Wellington, which one put 5.6 miles away. In 2023 Robert Poland told Boulder Weekly the milk came from Rockyview Farm, a 20-minute drive away, which also supplied milk for Noosa Yogurt. The company’s FAQ says only that it comes from a family dairy 20 minutes from the cheesery.

Each load is tested for its balance of proteins and fats and for antibiotics. It then passes through a high-temperature, short-time pasteurizer that recycles much of its own heat. By the company’s figure, that makes it 70 percent more efficient than an old vat pasteurizer. The milk rests overnight to “mellow out.” In the morning it is warmed to body temperature and given its cultures. Then comes a measure of veal rennet that the company puts at 0.0000375 grams per cheese. Within about an hour the curd has set. It is cut into dice-sized cubes, which draw tighter over the next half hour and press out their whey.

The curds and whey are then tipped out of the KBA, German for “tipping vessel,” as the company explains, into block forms. Each form holds 45 cheeses, and each tip fills eight forms. The forms are flipped a few times so the cheeses drain evenly. The next morning the cheeses are salted and set on stainless steel racks. The racks go into the ripening room for a few weeks, under watched humidity and temperature, while a white mold blooms over the surface and becomes the rind. The Coloradoan in 2017 gave the ripening time as ten days. Each finished round is wrapped in cheese paper imported from Memmingen, Birgit Halbreiter’s hometown in Bavaria. The paper lets the surface cultures take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, so the cheese goes on softening for months.

“The whole idea of cheese making is to create flavor with your culture and remove the water from the milk,” Poland told the Coloradoan. “It is a very exact science. It’s very time, temperature and humidity sensitive.”

Camembert was the first cheese. ColoRouge is smeared by hand with a surface culture during its two weeks of aging, which gives it a reddish-orange rind. Ashley wears a fine layer of edible vegetable ash. PepBert is the Camembert with whole green peppercorns worked in. Truffello rounds out the regular list.

The packing line has changed. In an April 2026 post the company recalled an era when much of the packaging was done by hand and a worker named Gerti made many of the boxes. A newer design, it said, cut packaging material and labor by about 92 percent. The machine can push toward 80 packages a minute, but the crew runs it at 40 to 60 so the sticker lands where it should. The post described “good speakers in the warehouse, a small team, sometimes three people, sometimes two, sometimes just one.” It added: “We miss Gerti. We do not miss making all those boxes.”

Squeaky curds and a once-a-year Boo

Cheddar curds came to MouCo almost by accident. “There was a cheesemaker who specialized in curds nearby who was selling their equipment,” Poland told Boulder Weekly in 2023. “We decided to try making cheese curds on the side. They were an immediate hit.” That year the curds won a prize at the American Cheese Society competition, a category Poland said is usually held by Wisconsin. “After we won, I imagine there were meetings going on at the big Wisconsin cheesemakers,” he said. Curds, he added, should be eaten within about a week. “[People] want them salty and squeaky.” MouCo also turns curds into beer cheese for local breweries, among them Weldworks in Greeley.

The fresh curds go out from the cheesery on pickup afternoons, 1:30 to 6:00, announced on the company’s Facebook page under the name Fresh Curd Club. They are sold by the bag. On June 22, 2026, the extra flavors were Elote and Everything Bagel.

From spring into fall the cheeses also travel. In the 2026 season MouCo set up on Saturdays at the Old Town Fort Collins and Greeley farmers markets and on Sundays at the Harmony Market in Fort Collins. PepBert was the spring special.

October belongs to Boo, a seasonal round dusted in ash and colored pumpkin-orange with annatto. According to the company, the ash raises the surface pH, and the annatto slows fermentation enough that a temperature shift sets off a new reaction in the culture blend. In late September 2026 the company said it was dividing each batch of Boo across every October weekend at its three markets, and that the previous weekend’s share had sold out in 32 minutes.

A science field trip and a father’s cheese factory

Birgit Halbreiter grew up in Memmingen. As a preschooler she tagged along to her father’s cheese factory, lifting buckets of cultures and watching quality tests in beakers. “It was like magic to me,” she told the Coloradoan. “I really believed my dad was a magician.” Franz Halbreiter had started making cheese at fifteen, Poland has said. His daughter trained and worked at Käserei Champignon in Kempten, then left Germany for Molson Breweries. She later became quality assurance manager, and eventually a board member, at New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins.

Robert Poland started a 28-paper route in Boulder at age 7. His teacher at a small Boulder school was Charlie Papazian, founder of the Homebrewers Association and the Great American Beer Festival. The company’s history calls Papazian his science teacher, and a U.S. Dairy Export Council profile says he taught math. Poland’s first look at fermentation came on a class trip, by public bus, to Papazian’s house to see a batch of beer in the bathtub. Papazian had found that the beer tasted better if he covered the tub with plastic wrap. Poland then spent a few years expecting to become Eddie Van Halen and a few more snowboarding. A job at an industrial French bakery in Boulder brought him back to fermentation, then to homebrewing, homebrew prizes, and the post of fermentation manager at New Belgium.

The two accounts of their meeting differ. The company’s history says Halbreiter met Poland at New Belgium. The Coloradoan reported that they met at a brewers conference held in the heart of Wisconsin’s cheese country, while she was at Molson, and that she joined him at New Belgium after they married. “It was go, go, go with triple-digit growth year after year,” she told the paper. “We worked our butts off there.”

Nearly ten years into brewing, Poland told a manufacturing profile, he read one of the free trade publications that land on brewers’ desks, this one about cheese’s rising popularity. The couple had stopped homebrewing. With Franz Halbreiter’s guidance, Poland built a cheese-aging room in their Fort Collins basement.

Camembert at the farmers market, then the airlines

Franz helped plan the launch. For the company’s first five years he spent about a month each year in Fort Collins working with Poland at the vats. The business moved out of the basement into a rented one-unit building, and its first Camembert went to local farmers markets. “People here have no clue about soft cheeses,” Halbreiter later said. “We get so many questions.”

The company’s own history dates its birth to June 2001, with a first sale soon after to Beavers Market in Fort Collins, and its first soft-ripened cheese to July 2001. On November 13, 2001, BizWest reported that “Colorado’s first Camembert cheese maker” had opened for business, with products bound for Wild Oats and Whole Foods. Other listings disagree on the year: a 2016 manufacturing profile gives 1999, and the Cheese Trail directory gives 2003.

MouCo at first ran one batch every four weeks. By 2016, Poland said, it ran four to six batches a week, about 10,000 rounds. About 70 percent of sales were corporate, among them resorts, hotels, the United Nations, Disney, Lufthansa, and British Airways. “Because we’re 4,000 miles closer, we can have a more complex cheese that’s still quite approachable,” he said, and added, “That doesn’t make us better cheesemakers necessarily — it just makes us 4,000 miles closer.” By 2023 he put the yearly count at 600,000 to 700,000 cheeses.

The American Cheese Society gave first places to ColoRouge in 2004, to the Camembert in 2007, and to Ashley in 2012, 2013, and 2016. At the World Cheese Awards in Bergamo, Italy, in October 2019, Ashley and ColoRouge each took bronze. North Forty News reported that no Colorado company had won more than one award at that competition before.

On June 6, 2026, the company posted: “MouCo turns 25 today.” Birgit was in Germany and Robert in Colorado on the day the two countries played each other. The post closed: “And somehow both the World Cup and our 25th anniversary arrived before we were quite ready for them.”