Barely Buzzed

Beehive Cheese

🧀🧀🩶🩶🩶 2.0

“A perfectly good cheddar wearing a coffee-shop cologne it didn't really need.”

Tasted June 4, 2026

✗ Probably not again

Milk: cow
Style: hard
Texture: firm
Origin: Uintah, Utah
Milk treatment: pasteurized
Price: $9 / 4oz
Funk-o-meter: ●●○○○

espressolavenderbutterscotchbutterymild cheddar

The one with the coffee-and-flowers crust. An espresso-rubbed cheddar sounds like either a great idea or a horrible idea, and I bought it to find out which.

The rind is the good part. You can taste the coffee in it, and the lavender too once the wrapper tells you that’s what you’re looking for, and against everything I assumed it actually works. The trouble starts under the rind. Slice toward the middle and it’s just regular cheddar, nothing that grabs you. For nine bucks I wanted to be won over, and I just wasn’t.

Glad I tried it. Won’t be back for it.

Ate it with: nothing but itself, working out toward the rind to chase down the coffee.

The Cheesemonger weighs in reflecting on the notes above

Dave's lukewarm read is fair, and it's partly the cheese setting itself up for it with that name. Barely Buzzed is Beehive Cheese's flagship out of Uintah, Utah, a full-fat cheddar hand-rubbed with a paste of finely ground South American espresso and French lavender. The operative word is *barely*. The rind was never supposed to taste like a latte. It's there to draw a butterscotch note out of an otherwise plain cheddar. So when Dave found a weird-but-good rind sitting on top of a fine cheese, he found the cheese doing precisely what it was built to do. If you showed up wanting fireworks, that lands as a shrug.

A couple of things before anyone writes it off. This is a cheese you eat toward the rind. The espresso and lavender live in the outer quarter-inch, so a slice from the dead center will taste like a decent mild cheddar and call it a day. And it was practically engineered for one pairing, a dark beer or, fittingly, a cup of actual coffee, where the roast in the glass goes shoulder to shoulder with the roast on the rind.

There's no shame in a two-wedge score. Barely Buzzed wins ACS awards and it's a great cheese for teaching someone that a rind can be a flavor all by itself. Being impressed and wanting to buy it again are just two different feelings, and Dave's palate clearly wants a cheese with more to say on its own.