Andy and Mateo Kehler never intended to make cheese. In the mid-1990s, the brothers, fresh out of college, moved to Vermont, where they had spent childhood holidays cannonballing into the lake near their grandparents’ summer home. They bought a couple hundred acres outside Greensboro (population 800) and then set about figuring out what to do with it.

“We were thinking of farmstead beer and growing our own hops,” Andy says. “We love beer.” But the economics of it turned out to be impractical. Their next notion was tofu. Again, unrealistic. Then they finally acknowledged the elephant in the Vermont economy—dairy. And with that, two cheesemakers and a brand, Jasper Hill Farm, were born.

In just four years, the Kehlers have gained a national reputation not just for their top-notch products—prominent restaurants, including Thomas Keller’s Per Se, feature Jasper Hill cheeses—but also for their business savvy and ambition. Now they’re planning their grandest venture yet: transforming Jasper Hill Farm into the powerhouse of Vermont cheesemaking.

The Kehlers want to be all things to all artisanal cheesemakers, offering everything from starter recipes to sales and marketing expertise to a facility for finishing cheeses—an aging process that, for some products, means months and even years of rind-washing, turning, testing, and careful monitoring. If all goes as planned, Jasper Hill will go from a boutique cheesemaker that turns out 75,000 pounds and grosses $800,000 annually into a multimillion-dollar juggernaut with its name on 20 times that amount of cheese by using a model that’s totally new to the American cheese industry. In typically understated Vermont fashion, Kristin van Vlaanderen, who makes cheese at Doe’s Leap Goat Farm, says it is “an interesting idea.”

In 1998, after the pair settled on cheesemaking, Mateo went to England to apprentice at Neal’s Yard Dairy, a temple of British farmstead cheeses, where he learned everything from production to marketing and sales. Meanwhile, Andy worked in construction, tinkered with their business plan, saved money, and secured financing from local banks—which took a year to do, because who wants to lend money to two greenhorn cheesemakers? In May 2003, they finally started making cheese. “I’d milk one of our cows into a five-gallon bucket and carry that bucket inside,” recalls Andy. “Mateo would add his fufu dust to it, and I’d milk the second cow.” The dust wasn’t exactly magic at first: “We gave [the initial batch] to this guy who has a bunch of pigs.”

But they got better—and quickly. Within months, they had more than quadrupled their herd and started producing edible cheese, and by the end of the first year, they were breaking even. Neal’s Yard founder Randolph Hodgson paid a visit, critiquing their methods and offering tips. “We worked our asses off, but we also got lucky,” Andy says. “The dollar was going down the tubes, so European cheeses became a lot more expensive. Fancy cheese stores started looking to the domestic market just as we were getting going.”

Today, Jasper Hill has more than 40 cows—a reasonably large herd for an artisanal maker—and produces five cheeses, all named after local heroes, landmarks, and neighborhoods. Constant Bliss, a semisoft, washed-rind prizewinner, is named after a Revolutionary War scout who was scalped by Indians. The richly veined Bayley Hazen Blue took its name from a military road that Washington used on the Canadian front. Bartlett is a local brook, Winnermere is the part of town where the Kehlers’ grandmother lives, and Aspenhurst is another neighborhood nearby. “It all comes down to terroir,” Andy says. “It’s the sense of place.” (And, to cheese experts, the quality. Jeff Roberts, author of The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese, calls Jasper Hill’s cheeses “distinctive in both flavor and texture, high-quality, and even visionary.”)

It takes only 10 minutes at Jasper Hill Farm to get a sense of what the place is trying to become. The farm is a big construction site, with giant concrete pourers trundling down the rutted drive to the spot behind the barn where the local stone has been blasted out and a 20,000-square-foot cheese palace is rising. The $3 million finishing facility, set to be done by winter, will have five environments—each varying in temperature and relative humidity, from the 39-degree, 95 percent humidity that a soft, mold-ripened cheese needs to the 55-degree, 85 percent humidity space that suits hard, aged cheese—and seven cellars. (In a nod to how fantastic it all seems, each is named for one of the Seven Dwarfs.) A robot, custom-made in Europe and only the second of its kind in America, will turn and brush aging cheddars. There will be offices, packing and shipping areas, and a loading dock.

The project is being financed with $2.3 million in loans and $700,000 in equity from an eclectic group of 11 investors, including friends and family of the Kehlers; Neal’s Yard Dairy; a Vermont nonprofit that supports sustainable farm use and land conservation; and the French affineur (or finisher) Herve Mons, who has a similar facility near Lille. “What they’re buying is a share of the revenue stream from the cellars,” explains Mateo.

He expects that stream to grow spectacularly once the facility comes online. Within a decade, the Kehlers hope to send trucks laden with 1.5 million pounds of cheese annually to markets across America. It’s a piddling amount compared with industrial cheesemakers; Kraft, America’s largest cheese processor, can produce 1.5 million pounds in just two days at its New Ulm, Minnesota, plant. But much of Jasper Hill’s cheese will come from makers who produce on an even smaller scale and don’t have the capacity to expand, to finish their cheeses themselves, or to sell beyond local farmers’ markets. “Maybe they’re totally disconnected from the national market, or they don’t have the confidence to make that flight to New York or that cold call. Or maybe they’re just not interested in doing some part of it,” Mateo says. “Jasper Hill will be the umbrella.”

Alison Hooper, a cheesemaking pioneer who co-founded Vermont Butter & Cheese Co. in 1982, says the Kehlers have identified areas of need among makers. “We’ve had a proliferation of cheesemakers who have a farm, a recipe, and milk,” she says. “But they have no real training, especially in the technology.”

The specialty-cheese market, which includes both foreign and U.S. high-end products, is estimated to be worth about $6 billion a year, and demand for artisanal and farmstead cheeses is growing 15 percent a year, faster than any other segment of the dairy market. It’s far outstripping cheesemakers’ ability to produce, leaving little time to refine or finish their products as they’d like. Jasper Hill is cashing in on this for clients such as Neil Urie of Bonnieview Farm in Craftsbury Common, who has sent some cheeses to Jasper Hill to be finished. “They probably take better care of it than I do,” Urie says. But that care comes at a price—a third of the $12 a pound that his Moss End blue and Ben Nevis hard sheep’s cheese gross at wholesale. Such finishing services are used also by more-prominent makers, including Cabot Creamery and Grafton Cheddar, and will account for 12.5 percent of the Jasper Hill’s revenue this year.

While the Kehlers’ “service provider” strategy is a new concept in the U.S., variations of the model have long thrived in other countries. The Kehlers are actually marrying the French way—in which milk from various farms is turned into Gruyère or Comté and finished at a central facility—with the English farmstead model, in which everything is done at one location and the names of the maker and farm are prominently linked to the cheese. “You can’t obscure the name of the maker here,” says Mateo. “It’s Yankee individualism.” Likewise, the Jasper Hill brand will have a place, however tiny, on a cheese’s label, whether it’s as the affineur, the marketer, or the selector, just as, say, a wine’s importer is always credited on the bottle.

Other makers welcome the visibility that Jasper Hill’s success would bring. “The more Vermont cheese is out there, the better off we all are,” says Van Vlaanderen of Doe’s Leap. But there’s also some polite skepticism, especially from some veteran Vermont cheesemakers. “We’re back-to-the-land hippies who just want our neighbors to buy our cheese. The next generation of farmers, they think, Screw the not-making-money part,” says Orb Weaver Farm’s Marjorie Susman, who in 1981 became Vermont’s first farmstead cheesemaker. “I hope it works, but not everything turns out as well as it looks on paper.”

Even Mateo Kehler admits the plan is “slightly crazy.” Back inside his farmhouse, two of his staff are channeling water out of a huge vat of curds. In about three months, the curds, helped along by mold and an affineur, will become Bartlett Blue, Jasper Hill’s riff on Stilton. In this, Mateo sees a metaphor for what they’re trying doing with the production process. “We get inspiration from the Old World and adapt it to the realities and constraints of our lives,” he says. “We don’t have the history, so we don’t have the constraints of history. That can be an advantage. Or not.”