Recipe
Baked feta with thyme honey and cracked pepper
Six-month feta bakes without collapsing. A younger, wetter cheese turns to soup in the same dish.
Craft note · 4 min read
Reading the barrel mark on your piece of feta
Every cut leaves here with five figures written on it. They are not decoration — they are the same numbers chalked on the barrel head in the cellar.
Example mark
- Barrel
- B14
- Filled
- 09-03
- Flock
- AS-1
- Brine
- 7.1%
- Cut lot
- C-06
Printed on the reverse of every label, and repeated on the case for trade cuts.
- B14
Barrel number
The individual beech barrel the cheese aged in. Fourteen barrels are in rotation; each behaves slightly differently and we track them separately for exactly that reason.
- 09-03
Fill date
Day and month the barrel was closed. Add six months and you have the earliest date it could legally and practically have been opened.
- AS-1
Flock code
Which of the two Ano Skotina flocks gave the milk. AS-1 grazes the higher western slope; AS-2 stays below the tree line.
- 7.1
Brine strength
Percentage salt in the barrel at fill. It drifts by a tenth or two over six months as the cheese takes salt up.
- C-06
Cut lot
Which cutting session your piece came from once the barrel was opened. Useful to us if anything is ever queried.
If you send us the mark, we can tell you which morning the milk came in, who was on the make, and when the barrel was opened. That traceability is the point of keeping the ledger by hand rather than pooling milk and printing a batch code at the end.
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