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.”)