A few years back, two dandies from the Big City — the former drag queen turned ad exec and writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell and his partner Brent Ridge, an assistant clinical professor at Mount Sinai, who served as vice president of healthy living for Martha Stewart< — came across an idyllic plot of land upstate in Sharon Springs, N.Y. Next thing you know, they bought the farm. Sounds like a recipe for a divorce or the plot of a reality television show. (Actually, as of a few weeks ago, it's the latter<.) Don't be fooled, though. Meticulously tidy trappings aside, Beekman 1802 — the name of the property and the brand the "Fabulous Beekman Boys" have built around it — is earnestly committed to sustainability and produces some righteously good cheese.
Things started out so simply. Beekman 1802 was to be a weekend escape where Kilmer-Purcell and Ridge could get back to basics, till the soil, plant a vegetable garden and get a few goats. The duo planned to maintain the property’s status as a working farm and to live off the bounty: they used their goats’ milk to make soap, yogurt and cheese for their own consumption.
Ridge, who described himself as “the villain — the type-A Martha Stewart person who wreaks havoc on every person’s life because of my quest for perfection,” thought it might be nice to give his D.I.Y. mentor a bar of his homemade soap for Christmas. Nice, indeed. Stewart was so impressed she put it on her show. “That’s when we knew people would want to buy it and how we launched the company,” said Ridge, who saw the potential for an entire lifestyle concept in that single soap. He and Kilmer-Purcell would render farming chic. They weren’t going to design impractical but beautifully stitched gardening gloves; they were going to sell the act of gardening itself. Same with feeding pigs, milking cows or, yes, making cheese.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: The New York Times.