Yesterday, Jamie Forrest told us about the the winner of the American Cheese Society's Best in Show cheese. Sasha Davies of the blog Cheese by Hand served on the society's judging committee and has an interesting peek into the judges' chambers:

Each cheese is marked with an alphanumeric code- you can see them on the stickers in the photo. This prevents the judges from knowing for certain what any individual cheese is, who it was made by, etc. Bob and I would taste each cheese together- discuss- complete our judging sheets separately and then move on to the next. A lot of people have asked me about spitting- I found that it didn’t make much of a difference because you’re not taking big bites or many bites of each cheese and spitting out a mouthful of food into a bucket just didn’t work for me. So I pretty much fully ate all of them.