New Year, New Cheese – The Best Cheese for 2026

Happy New Year!

If you’re a devoted cheese lover, we’re sure you had plenty of the good stuff over the winter break. Whether it was a carefully crafted cheese board full of your favourites, or a wedge of some of our best to enhance your cooking, it certainly was the best time for cheese.

You might have also given out some cheese gift hampers to your loved ones, so they can experience our incredible artisan cheese for themselves.

Now you might be a little cheesed-out, but us and many others will be keen to try even more new flavours this year, and we’re more than happy to help you with that. So, let’s take a look at what you can do to make your 2026 as cheesy as it should be.

Cheese that’s Ready to Eat

If you received a cheese gift hamper for Christmas, but you haven’t had chance to dive in just yet, you’ll be glad to know that your cheese will still be fresh for a while longer.

Although we started preparing our Christmas range back in October and November, blue cheese can only have a use by date with a maximum of 28 days from cutting. Since some people were able to delay their delivery to the 2nd and 3rd weeks of December, it will still be within the freshness window, but we recommend having it now. Blue cheese has a use by date rather than a best before date.

We don’t use any artificial preservatives, instead relying on the oldest and most natural salt as part of the essential ingredient to keep the cheese fresh for longer. Our cheese is aged as naturally as possible, with no pressed removal of moisture after it’s placed in its mould, and we pierce our blue cheese by hand to introduce oxygen that naturally create those iconic veins.

If you’re one of the lucky people who has some Hartington Creamery cheese ready to enjoy, here’s how to do it.

How to Enjoy Artisan Cheese

The best way to enjoy a selection of cheese is by creating a cheeseboard. Although every type of cheese we produce is amazing on its own, for the best experience we recommend picking out a few, as well as the right accompaniments to go with it (more about those in a moment!).

If you bought your cheese hamper yourself, or are the resident cheese expert in your home, you’ll know which will be the flavours people will be expecting. For example, our Squadron cheddar is loved by all, and white and blue stilton are some of the nation’s favourites for good reason. But some of our bolder flavours, such as Peakland blue and chocolate and chilli cheese, can be an acquired taste, so we wouldn’t recommend cutting off too many pieces until you know if they’re winners.

2026 is a new year, making it the perfect opportunity to try new things. So if you’re not sure if one of the included cheese wedges is for you, dive in anyway as you will often be pleasantly surprised!

But if not, you can always cleanse your palette before you go back to more familiar ground. To do that, you need some amazing cheese accompaniments.

The Best Accompaniments for Artisan Cheese

Cheese on its own is a delicious treat, but for the ultimate experience, you need to try it with additional flavours.

The best choice of accompaniments depends on the type of cheese you’re enjoying. Classic white cheese, for example, pairs well with our Popti biscuits, some chutney or piccalilli, and some of our Derbyshire Pale Ale. Blue cheese has a stronger flavour on its own, so you don’t want to drown it out, instead complementing it with fruity flavours, again from chutney, or with a nice red wine or port.

Liquid accompaniments are the most important addition to a cheese board. Like we said, the cheese is great on its own, but having one cheese after another will dull the flavour of the latter. If you take a sip of an alcoholic beverage between bites, you’ll enhance the flavour and also cleanse your palette for the next one.

If alcohol isn’t to your liking, there are non-alcoholic accompaniments for cheese that achieve the same result. These include:

• Fresh Fruit Juice
• Sparkling Juice or Soda
• Chai Tea
• Black Coffee
• Virgin Cocktails or Non-Alcoholic Wine/ Beer

No matter what you choose, make sure it’s good quality. A poor choice of accompaniments can ruin a cheese board!

Looking to the Future

Hartington Creamery has been in operation for over one hundred and fifty years (yes, you read that right!), so we’re used to seeing in the new year by now. But like any business, we need to plan ahead, as standing still will make us stale.

In 2025, we released a number of brand-new cheeses. Some were to celebrate events, such as our limited-edition Squadron cheese for VE Day, and some were bold new flavours we’d been cooking up for a while. We also had some returning favourites, such as the iconic Traditional Derby cheese and our brand new derivative Red Derby cheese, which are revivals of a forgotten regional cheese that was once a familiar UK favourite.

2026 will be full of brand-new inventions and classics that take you back in time. Although we have to keep our cards close to our chest for now, if you stick with us for the rest of the year, you’ll hear all about what’s coming up very soon.

In the meantime, why not pick up some of your favourite cheeses, or a new cheese wedge that you haven’t tried yet? To make this easier, you can pick up a gift hamper that can be filled with cheese of your choice and relevant accompaniments, or you can use our cheese subscription service so that fresh flavours are delivered to your door on a regular basis.

No matter what, we hope you have a great year, and can’t wait to share more insights and advice from the world of artisan cheese.