A delicious trove of aging cheese sits 30 feet below the bustling streets of Brooklyn. It’s way more cheesy than just a couple wheels of parmesan, too. There’s nearly 22,000 pounds of cheese sitting down there.
The cheese belongs to Crown Finish Caves. The company doesn’t make their own cheese, but it does age young cheeses from around the world in the unique underground environment. There’s domestic cheese from places like Wisconsin and Vermont, small-batch artisanal cheese from Brooklyn, and old world European cheeses.
Crown Finish Caves is a bit of a misleading name. Technically, the “caves” aren’t caves at all. They’re old tunnels dug out by the Nassau Brewery in the 1850s. The brewery used the tunnels as refrigeration to keep their lagers at a steady 50 degrees Fahrenheit all year round until it closed in 1914. Now, more than 100 years later, that beer has been replaced with cheese.
