The great revelation to me since i started last November is that the ageing is the hardest bit of the whole process.
I absolutely agree with this! However I think it was Jim Wallace who said that 80% of cheese making is in the make. If you get the make wrong then affinage is just damage control. This is also true :-) When I was first getting started (which is not actually that long ago...) it used to frustrate me that most commercial producers would just say that natural rinds were basically about having a good cellar and then letting everything go. Once you get all of those little variable right, it just works.
My biggest advice is always to start off with aging less. You can make any kind of cheese you want, but don't age it for long times at first. Make a cheese and age it for a week. Then eat it. Notice that normally almost nothing grows on the rind in the first week. You eat the cheese. It's mild (some will say bland), but you can taste how it is aging. If you run into troubles in the first week, then you need to stop and address the situation. Are you under cooking your curds leading to too much moisture in the cheese, leading to lots of mildew and blue even in the first week? Are you overpressing your cheese leading to similar symptoms? Is your humidity too high? These are all really common problems I see on reddit and stuff that's very difficult to recover from.
On the other side of the coin, is your rind not closed? Do you have cloth marks in the cheese? Do you have cracks or gashes? Learning how to make a smooth rind just makes your life a million times easier. It's very, very difficult (almost to the point of impossibility) to age a cheese for a long time with lots of bumps, cracks or crevices because blue will grow in there. Or it will trap moisture and b. linens will grow, get into your paste and eventually turn your cheese brown and essentially rotten. So again, I recommend planning to age out for a week while you work on that. No matter what horrible aging thing happens in that first week, your cheese will still be good (if a bit bland).
Then once you are aging your cheese out for a week and it's not covered in blue or covered in black mildew dots, then think about aging out for 3 weeks. 3 weeks is a good point because geotrichum will normally bloom in that time. If you are going to get blue, then it will also bloom. You have to think about your strategy. Are you going to wash frequently (leading to a washed rind cheese or an alpine rind), or are you going to do a brushed or mold ripened rind? Are you going to encourage geotrichum to grow, or can you get thricothesium (mycodore) to grow instead? Trying a variety of different approaches is good. Within 3 weeks, you can get b. linens growing if that's your goal. You can get full geotrichum coverage too. Practice getting to that point.
Then think about going 5-7 weeks out. The 3 week mark is nice because at 3 weeks you have the option of washing what you have off and starting to oil the rind (you don't want to do it earlier, as I recently discovered because you will get yeasts growing in really weird ways, disturbing your rind). In a mold ripened rind, the rind is basically getting established and the cheese is starting to think about succession molds. Again, you can wash it here to get a bit of b. linens before those succession molds hit, or you can leave it. Blue sometimes makes a last desperate attack at this point, so you can get used to that and decide what you want to do about it: wash it, brush it, leave it alone. If you have been going for a washed rind/alpine rind then you can start to think about stopping washing soon and letting the rind dry off. You can see if it *will* dry off with the cheese moisture you have and the humidity you have.
Also, by eating the cheese somewhere at the 5 week mark you can see how the paste is being affected. Are you getting too much softening of the paste near the rind? It may be that your cheese was too acidic. It may be that you drained the curds too late. Similarly, is the paste crumbly and tart with a lot of cracks? Maybe it refermented. Did you over press? Or maybe the paste is too dry. Did you over cook the curds? Time to cycle back and fix those problems. And honestly, you don't want to wait too much longer than this. 5 weeks out is more than a month. If it takes you 5 times to dial in your recipe (which is what it normally takes me), then it means that you are spending something like half a year before you can make a good version of that cheese. Imagine if you waited 3 months! You might give up making cheese before you ever really nailed a cheese style!
Once you get out to 7 weeks, though, suddenly everything is about 100x easier. And part of the reason for this is: your make is good for this style of cheese and the aging technique you used is appropriate. The vast majority of major problems have already been avoided. But the other reason is that the rind is established and no matter what style you are using, all of the defenses are in place. There is actually very little you need to do at this point. Just maintain the environment and flip the cheeses occasionally (and possibly brush/oil them). Compared to the hyper focused first month, it really does feel like you are doing nothing at all.
I think especially, though, if you specialise in a cheese/rind treatment, then once you have dialed things in, stuff very rarely goes wrong. When it does, you already have the experience to spot it very early and you can make really small adjustments to ensure that it proceeds well later. I think this is the main reason why the pros write almost nothing about affinage. If you are doing it day in and day out for years in an environment and process that is already dialed in, it seems like you are doing nothing.
