Green-carpeted hills roll away from Maryland Farm in Somerset, England, where a man named Daniel Barber began making farmstead cheese in 1833. Nearly 200 years later, his family’s Barber’s Farmhouse business is still going strong, now the oldest cheddar-maker in the world.

“The valley we’re in here is one of the most fertile and densely used dairy areas in the UK,” says Barber’s Farmhouse managing director Giles Barber, who is Daniel Barber’s great-great-great-grandson.

Fifteen miles away is the village of Cheddar itself, where early cheesemakers used limestone caves and gorges as natural refrigerators. (While the village gave cheddar cheese a name, historians say the cheese style developed regionally.)

Today, Barber’s Farmhouse is one of a small handful of producers allowed to sell cheese labeled West Country Farmhouse Cheddar, a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) with strict requirements. When making their Barber’s 1833 cheddar cheese, a cheese that’s included in the PDO, Barber’s producers use many techniques that the 19th-century founder would have recognized.

Milk comes from nearby dairy herds. Cheese curds are still turned over by hand. Eschewing the convenience of freeze-dried cultures, Barber’s Farmhouse maintains a collection of traditional cultures, strains of bacteria that convert milk’s natural lactose into flavorful lactic acid.

In an era of industrially produced, globalized food, Barber’s Farmhouse recalls a time when flavors and traditions were more regional.

But even when Daniel Barber first sold cheese in 1833, he was helping to nudge Britain’s food system towards the modern day. He couldn’t have known it, but his tangy, mellow cheddar was poised for a global expansion that leveraged immigration, technology and tradition.