Most of America’s famous cheese country sits up north, where cows spend the winter in the barn. Sweet Grass Dairy is a different story. In Thomasville, Georgia, the cows graze fresh grass all year, and you can taste it in the cheese. This July, the family’s soft-ripened Green Hill took first place at the American Cheese Society competition. Here’s how a dairy farm, a farmhouse kitchen, and two Atlanta transplants built one of the South’s best-known creameries.
It Started With Grass, Not Cheese
The Sweet Grass story begins with a change of mind about cows. Al and Desiree Wehner were conventional dairy farmers. In 1992, Desiree attended a conference on New Zealand-style rotational grazing, and it changed how the family thought about farming. Instead of keeping cows in barns and bringing feed to them, rotational grazing brings the cows to the feed. The herd moves to a fresh strip of pasture on a regular schedule, eats the grass down, and then moves on while that strip regrows.
The Wehners made the switch in the early 1990s, moved to southwest Georgia, and traded their Holsteins for Jersey cows, a smaller breed known for rich, high-butterfat milk. According to Zingerman’s Deli, which has sold Sweet Grass cheese for years, the grazing system means fewer added fertilizers and longer, healthier lives for the cows.
Southwest Georgia turned out to be a near-perfect place for it. The climate is mild, and water is plentiful, so the grass keeps growing through the winter. The cows are moved to fresh pasture about every 12 hours, year-round. That makes Sweet Grass one of the few American creameries that produces cheese year-round from pasture-raised cows.
A Farmhouse Kitchen and a Steep Learning Curve
The cheese came later, from Desiree’s kitchen. She started experimenting with recipes at home, and in 2000 the family founded Sweet Grass Dairy. The local press has described it as Georgia’s first cheesemaker.
In 2002, Jessica Little, the Wehners’ daughter, and her husband, Jeremy, left Atlanta to join the business. Neither had made cheese before, though Jeremy had a culinary background. “Everything was brand new,” Jeremy told Local Palate. “I have been fortunate that [Desiree] let me make mistakes and didn’t fire me.”
Those mistakes didn’t last long. At the creamery’s first American Cheese Society conference in 2002, Sweet Grass won five awards, according to Cheese Connoisseur. In 2005, Jessica and Jeremy bought the cheese business from Jessica’s parents. Jeremy became head cheesemaker, and Jessica took on sales, marketing, and the customer side of the business.
Choosing Focus Over Variety
When the Littles took over, Sweet Grass made cheese from both cow’s and goat’s milk. After about five years, they made what they called “a really hard decision” and sold the goats to focus solely on cow’s milk cheese.
The family still provides the milk. Jessica’s brother, Clay Wehner, runs the family’s grazing dairies, and the Wehners supply all the milk used in Sweet Grass cheese, according to The Cheese Professor. That kind of control matters. When the same family manages the pasture, the herd, and the cheese vat, the cheesemaker knows exactly what is going into every batch.
It also means the cheese changes with the seasons, in a good way. The Littles describe their cheese as tasting “woodsy and earthy in the late fall” and “floral and grassy in the spring.” That’s terroir at work, the idea that a cheese carries the taste of the place it comes from. We explore it in depth in Every Cheese Wheel Has a Story Behind It.
Growing Without Losing the Farm
In 2010, the Littles opened a cheese shop in downtown Thomasville. They wanted to hear directly from the people eating their cheese again, after years of selling most of it far from home.
Demand kept growing. “In talking with other cheesemakers, we realized we were too small to be big but too big to be small,” Jessica told The Cheese Professor. Their answer was a new 12,500-square-foot creamery on Roseway Drive in Thomasville. Production started there in December 2020, and they cut the ribbon in February 2021. The new plant arrived at the right time. “We’ve been able to sell to Publix and Kroger, and at our old plant we wouldn’t have been able to meet that capacity,” Jessica told WALB News.
Through it all, Sweet Grass has remained a family business. The Littles raised four sons while running the creamery, and two of their cheeses, Asher Blue and Griffin, are named after their sons. “I am so proud to make something that represents the food of the South,” Jessica has said.
Green Hill Takes First Place in Louisville
Green Hill is the cheese that put Sweet Grass on the national map. It’s a small, double-cream, Camembert-style round made from pasteurized cow’s milk. “Double-cream” means extra cream is added to the milk, giving the cheese its rich, buttery texture. A soft white rind, called a bloomy rind, grows on the outside as the cheese ripens. Culture magazine describes a golden paste with “aromas of sautéed mushrooms and cream” and “flavors of sweet butter and popcorn.”
This July, Green Hill took first place among Brie and Camembert-style cow’s milk cheeses at the 2026 American Cheese Society Judging & Competition, a blind-judged contest with nearly 1,600 entries. It wasn’t the cheese’s first win in that competition. Green Hill also took first place at ACS in 2015. Sweet Grass’s pimento cheese, made from its raw-milk Thomasville Tomme, earned two more ribbons this year: second place for the food service version and third for the retail version. You can check every result in the American Cheese Society’s official 2026 winner list.
How to Enjoy Green Hill at Home
Green Hill is at its best when you let it warm up. Take it out of the fridge about an hour before serving so the inside turns soft and spoonable. The rind is meant to be eaten. It adds a gentle, mushroomy note that balances the rich center. If you’ve ever wondered which rinds are safe to eat, our guide Cheese Rinds: To Eat or Not to Eat? covers it.
For drinks, Culture suggests sparkling wine or a Belgian tripel ale. The bubbles cut through the creaminess and refresh your palate between bites. On a board, pair Green Hill with sweet preserves, dried figs, local honey, mild salami, or something bright and juicy like watermelon in summer. For more ideas, see our complete guide to cheese and wine pairing.
Leftovers need a little care. Soft cheeses like Green Hill keep best wrapped in cheese paper or wax paper, not plastic wrap, which traps moisture. Our guide on how to store cheese properly at home explains why.
Once you’ve tried Green Hill, explore the rest of the lineup. Thomasville Tomme is a semi-soft, French-inspired raw-milk cheese aged 60 to 90 days. Asher Blue is a natural-rind blue with a bolder personality. You can buy Sweet Grass cheese at its shop in downtown Thomasville, at grocery stores, and through Goldbelly, which ships it nationwide. Visit Sweet Grass Dairy for current availability.
Where Good Cheese Begins
Sweet Grass Dairy is proof that great cheese starts long before the cheese vat. It started with a farmer willing to rethink how cows should live, a family that kept the pasture and the creamery under one roof, and a couple who learned the craft by doing it, mistakes and all. Twenty-six years after the family founded Sweet Grass, Green Hill is still winning, and still tasting like Georgia grass.
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