Alpine cheese: WTF is that weird smell?

[Intrepidfred]

Heya!

I tried the alpine cheese with washed rind recipe from cheesemaking.com - the cheese is beautiful and seems to be swelling a bit because of the P. Shermani. It's been aging for 30 days now.

But... the cheese just went through a weird development phase: white fuzzy mold appeared. I washed it away. Then an orange colour from B. Linens. It became greasy/oily.

My issue is with the smell though. During these last 30 days, the cheese was a bit swampy and smelled like a swamp. Now that's it's been moved to my cold aging space, the swampy-ness is gone and the odour is neutral.

Also, it is my first time using B. Linens. When you wash the surface, does it produce a « paste » the colour of cheese whiz?!

Should I continue aging it or it's probably not good?

[millenof6]

B linens will give you quite the funk smell.  And yes it does give you the orange paste on the outside.  I think the cheese should be fine.

[mikekchar]

The white fuzzy mold is almost certainly geotrichum.  Totally normal and a good sign.  It raises the pH of the rind and helps the b. linens get established.  Really, the two work in tandom, but because washed rinds are normally quite wet, the geotrichum doesn't usually bloom until a long time later.   After you dry off the rind, you should expect that white to come back.  You can just brush it off.

Indeed, when you wash the rind, you want a paste, exactly as you describe.  It is called a schmear.  The geotrichum makes it slimey.  Here is "the thread" for alpine washed rinds: https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,10633.0.html

Sounds like everything is going perfectly.