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About South Caernarfon Creameries

Dragon Welsh milk is collected daily from our 125 family owned dairy farms. Their farms are spread across North and Mid Wales. The cows on these farms have delicious lush grass to graze on with some enjoying the view of Snowdonia National Park!

Our tankers travel across Wales every day to collect milk from the farms and take it back to our Creamery, the milk is carefully stored and quality tested before we make our cheese and butter. The milk is pasteurised which destroys any harmful bacteria and then pumped over to the cheese-making vats to start its transformation into award-winning Dragon cheese

Starter cultures (a special blend of bacteria) are added to the milk, this converts the milk sugar (lactose) to acid to begin the cheese-making process. Vegetarian rennet is then added to set the milk and it forms a blancmange type product. This is cut into pieces forming curds and whey which are stirred together.

The whey is drained away leaving the curd which makes the cheese. The curd is milled into small chips and placed on our cheese tables, where we salt the cheese by hand, one of many traditional processes that we have retained. Once the salt has been added and mixed in, the curd chips are made into cheese blocks in special towers and transferred to a cool store for maturing.

Maturation is a lengthy process as we mature Dragon vintage cheese for up to 2 years. Our team of experienced Dragon Cheese Graders continually monitor and taste the cheese. Choosing which ones will mature the best and which ones will be good to eat young and mild.

Once the cheese has reached its peak we prepare it for sale in all our different formats from 20kg blocks for catering cheese to 180g retail packs to use at home.