Stone Tree Dairy near Dartmouth has won Gold at the Taste of the West Awards 2026 for their goats cheese ‘Dimpsy’.

‘Dimpsy’ is a soft, bloomy-rinded white cheese made with raw goats milk from their own, outdoor raised goats.

The winning product, which is new this year, can now display the highly respected Taste of the West Awards logo on their packaging, recognised across the South West as a trusted symbol of quality and consistency.

Having been promoting and supporting the region’s food and drink industry for over 30 years, the Awards are also now supported by a new programme developed

Co-owner Helen Boyd says they went by a simple principle: “We just try and be as authentic to the cheeses to the original milk as we possibly can be so we don't add things like truffle or black pepper or whatever it happens to be you know we want to have a product that really shows off the quality of the cheese.”

She was delighted to hear of the win: “That was great news for us.

“It's always difficult when you launch a new cheese because there's a lot of risk, a lot of trial and error involved and people are inevitably quite reluctant to try something that they haven't perhaps seen before.

“Dartmouth has been incredibly welcoming to us in terms of developing the farm in the first place but also becoming almost ambassadors for our for our cheese and many people want to come and see us which is lovely.”

Helen and Martin Boyd first bought the farm in 2000 having moved to the area following careers in Marketing.

Helen is also the Chair of the Trustees at Rowcroft Hospice and Martin has previous experience of farming.

It had been a beef farm before and they invested in new buildings including the cheese dairy that started in 2024 as Helen explained: “We started selling our cheese first of all in October of that year at Dartmouth Food Festival so we've just done our third food festival

Since the beginning we’ve launched six cheeses including ‘Dimpsy’.

Taste of the West is the South West of England's leading food and drink membership organisation, supporting producers, hospitality and retail businesses across Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Bristol and the Channel Islands. It runs the Taste of the West Awards alongside training, sustainability, mentoring and commercial partnership support for its members.

At Stone Tree Dairy they have a team of about eight who are mostly women, all local and come from a variety of backgrounds.

Helen said there are some challenges when it comes to rearing goats: “They are very inquisitive so it's like having 300 giant puppies running around.

“They're very playful and will try and get out.

“They want to nibble at everything to see what it tastes like so they're they're eating pasture and that means that they can be quite prone to parasites particularly as we keep our goats outside.

“It's that's less of a problem if you keep your animals inside of course but that's the trade-off from our point of view and overall we feel they're healthier and they're certainly happier by being raised outdoors.”