Mark Taylor meets the artisan cheese maker who's been a runaway success at local farmers' markets

M aking cheese for a living wasn't on the curriculum when Tim Homewood was studying for his City and Guilds in Hospitality and Catering. When he left college, he took a more traditional route into the food and drink world.

Tim worked in a British Rail buffet, and then spent time as a barman, but it was during this time that he started to appreciate the subtleties and nuances of handmade artisan cheese.

"I was working behind the bar at the Castle Hotel in Taunton and I kept tasting great cheeses and I guess my love of it started there," says Tim, who lives in Litton, near Bristol.

It was to be a defining moment, for he then approached the Bath Soft Cheese company for a job as a trainee cheese maker.

Until then, Tim had never made cheese before but he learnt quickly and ended up staying there for a couple of years before joining former Bath Soft Cheese maker Pete Humphries when he started his new Whitelake cheese company.

Tim worked with Pete for just over two years, after which he started to think about going it alone and setting up his own business.

The result is Homewood, a new cheese company that has started to sell its products at farmers' markets in Bristol, Bath, Portishead and Clevedon, as well as through the national Abel and Cole organic box schemes.

Tim set up Homewood with his girlfriend Angela Morris, who runs her own successful chutneys, preserves and cake business Angela's Kitchen. The couple originally met at the weekly Tobacco Factory market in Bristol where they had adjacent stalls. You could say love blossomed over the truckles and chutneys.

The couple are the quintessential cottage industry. On Wednesdays, Tim is locked away on a farm between Shepton Mallet and Wells making cheese while Angela is selling it alongside her jams and pickles at Bristol Farmers' Market. On Saturdays, Tim sells the cheese in Bath while Angela is making her products or selling them at one of the other markets.

Although they are running a single stall now with both their products, the plan is to merge it into a single business soon.

However, there is already a crossover point with the two businesses as Angela has started to bake with Tim's cheeses – cheesecakes and pastries – as a way of promoting the cheese as an ingredient as well as something to enjoy on its own and people can't seem to get enough of it.

"We've been amazed how quickly the business has taken off," says Tim. "We've only been making the cheese since the end of last year and we already have regular customers."

Tim's cheeses are made by hand in small batches. They are all made with sheep's milk sourced from a farm in Dorset.

There are three types of cheese in the Homewood range – a fresh cheese, a washed curd cheese called Old Demdike ("it's named after an old Lancastrian witch – legend has it that witches curdle milk") and a sheep's milk cheese called Tim's Pickled Ewes' Cheese.

The latter is essentially a feta in all but name but Tim isn't allowed to call it that because of a EU ruling a few years ago which ruled that only Greek cheese makers could use the term "feta".

"I've got to be careful after what happened a few years ago in Yorkshire when a cheese maker called her product Yorkshire feta," says Tim. "She ended up in court and lost the case. Her cheese had to be called Fine Fettle Yorkshire after that."

All three of Tim's cheeses are delicious, each one with its own distinctive character and flavour. The fresh cheese, in particular, is a revelation – like a creamier, smoother version of cottage cheese – and it is already in demand with chefs who are putting it on their menus.

These cheeses are a totally different product to the mass-produced, plastic-wrapped cheeses that line supermarket shelves. They may be fractionally more expensive, but they deliver considerably more flavour.

For Tim, making his own cheese is a dream come true and he says one of the most interesting things about it is the fact that cheese is very much a living product and no two cheeses are the same.

"It's fascinating because each cheese can be dependent on things like the milk, the temperature and even the weather. It's a unique type of food production."

And as for Tim's Pickled Ewe's Cheese, well that is proving especially popular as it is a pure sheep's milk cheese (most commercial fetas are a mix of sheep and goat milk).

In fact, if you like a certain white, salty Greek cheese that works especially well in a salad with olives and cucumber, you will love Tim's Pickled Ewe's Cheese. Just remember not to mention the F word.

Homewood cheeses are on sale at Bath Farmers' Market, Green Park Station, on Saturday mornings and every other Wednesday at Bristol Farmers' Market in Corn Street (the next one is June 4). For more information, call 01761 241413.