In a happy coincidence, Simply Better Organic Cashel Blue Cheese had only just arrived on shelves at Dunnes Stores when it was announced as the winner of the the Nigel Barden heritage award at the Great Taste Golden Forks in London last month. It also received three stars at the 2026 Great Taste Awards, in what has been a stellar year for the cheese.

For Sarah Grubb, whose family has been making Cashel Blue in Co Tipperary for more than 40 years, the win carries extra weight given the calibre of the judging panel.

“You need to remember that this is the British Guild of Fine Food,” she says. “I think it’s remarkable that in the context of blue cheese, in a setting in Britain – and Britain has centuries of tradition in blue cheese – Ireland is the new kid on the block. Our history is butter, not semi-soft, mould-ripened cheeses. So, I think it was pretty remarkable in that context to receive a heritage award.”

The story of Cashel Blue began with a cup of tea at the RDS Spring Show, when Sarah’s father Louis Grubb, who was already running the family dairy farm, spotted a fridge of imported speciality cheeses at their co-op’s stand – cheese that wasn’t cheddar and wasn’t made in Ireland. Among them was Danish Blue.

“He said to them, ‘why are you importing cheese when we can make that in Ireland?’” Sarah says. Nobody was making it in Ireland. “And he said, ‘well, if I made it, would you sell it?’ And they said, ‘why wouldn’t we?’ It was actually a very innocent conversation.”

At the time, Danish Blue accounted for effectively the entire Irish blue cheese market, a gap her parents Louis and Jane realised could give their own dairy farm a sustainable future.

“My parents, Louis and Jane, created Cashel Blue so that our family could stay on our farm,” Sarah says. “And if we could stay on our farm, we could in turn provide a bit of employment within a rural community.”

More than four decades on, that original Cashel Blue is still made in Tipperary and remains the cheese most people know. Organic Cashel Blue is a newer addition to the family, made to the same basic recipe, with the same fermentation cultures, the same rennet, and the same penicillium roqueforti seasoning the milk to create the blue veining.

“We understand yeasts and moulds as a society, but we don’t really understand moulds as a seasoning,” she says. “That’s all it is. It’s a flavouring.”

Organic version

What sets the organic version apart starts with the milk, which comes from a single herd of around 60 cows on the Mulrooney family farm near Kilsheelan. One of the first organic dairy farms in the country, it was the Mulrooneys who approached the Grubbs about making an organic version. “We thought, we don’t know if there’s a market for organic Cashel Blue,” Sarah says. “But then we decided to give it a go.”

Organic farming brings its own constraints, a shorter milking season and no Irish-grown organic oats in winter.

Rather than fight those limits, the Grubbs built the cheese around them, ageing it far longer and slower than the original. “We took a very different approach to the ageing of this cheese,” Sarah says. “People talk about slow cooking a lot; this is slow ageing. We would use terms like low and slow.”

Where classic Cashel Blue typically reaches a Dunnes Stores shelf at around 12 to 14 weeks old, the organic version is aged for five to seven months, “a very, very big difference,” as Sarah describes it.

The extra time at low temperatures changes how the natural fats in the milk break down, giving the organic cheese its own distinct texture: creamy, rounded, and noticeably different from its counterpart.

The Golden Fork judges picked up on exactly that. Made using organic grass-fed milk in Tipperary, they wrote, the semi-soft blue transported them “straight to a freshly mown hayfield and then onto the milking parlour”. Their verdict was sweet and creamy.

For Sarah, there’s something else exceptional about the cheese: a single herd supplying one named product is a rarity on any dairy shelf, she says, at a time when most herds in the region need around 150 cows to be commercially viable.

Simple pairings

Sarah suggests simple pairings such as local Irish honey, or the Simply Better quince membrillo from Dunnes Stores. “I’m leaning into quite pure, natural flavours,” she says. “When you have something that’s quite a big flavour in its own right, you don’t want to confuse it too much.”

Celery sticks and a glass of cider make, “a really, really good combination”, she adds, or try it crumbled over smoked chipotle almonds for something with more kick. Both versions work well in cooking too, crumbled over steak or chicken or scattered through a salad.

“It’s really suited to crumbling over steak, it just elevates it,” concludes Sarah.

For anyone who knows and loves Cashel Blue, Sarah suggests they try the organic version alongside it, available now in Dunnes Stores nationwide.