We have a small storage space in our building and I've been monitoring the temp in there over the months, and even in the summer it is basically a steady 59.5, except on the warmest summer days when it goes up into the low 60's for maybe a few hours. Right now my cheese caves are just small picnic coolers with ice packs where I place my individual cheese ripening boxes, and those are a perfect 52 with easy humidity controls using just damp paper towels within the box. I'd love to be able to just put some cheeses in ripening boxes in the storage unit, without the coolers, which really limit the number of cheese I can do at once or store for any time.
Any thoughts on what cheeses would do well enough at these temperatures to risk making and keeping? Even if requiring more regular and careful care, which isn't the problem as I can pop down there as many times as I need to wipe or brush or wash. What cheeses would definitely still do much better in the picnic cooler caves that I use now? Are there any cheese that would actually prefer this warmer kind of cheese cave? Since my experience has mostly been moldy cheese like camembert, nothing requiring long affinage, I don't really know what my options might be. I'd really like to try havarti and some washed rind cheese that take more time, or even some of the bigger blues and caerphilly, but if they all need little cooler caves, I'd have to still plan carefully to make sure I can house them. If 59 degrees is still cold enough to store them for a while, that would be amazingly good news.
Personally I wouldn't. Hitting 59 or 60 F once in a while is not too damaging, but if you age your cheeses at those temps you are likely to get off flavours. Basically, the flavour of cheese is created by enzymes in the cheese breaking down the proteins (and fats, but I won't talk about that). An enzyme is a bit like a key for a lock. Each key unlocks a different lock. The proteins are long chains. The chains are made up of smaller chains called peptides. The peptides are made up of small links called amino acids. Each enzyme will break apart the protein at a different place. This will create different peptides and amino acids in your cheese. Each one of those peptides and amino acids has a different flavour. Some flavours are good and some are bad.
The tricky part is that different enzymes are active at different temperatures. It's also not an on and off thing. Within the range that an enzyme is active, it will work slower at low temperatures and higher at high temperatures. So if you have enzymes that are happiest working between 5-10 C, and others that work from 7-12 C, you can prefer one enzyme over another by adjusting the temperature. At 5 degrees, on the the first will be active to any degree. At 7 degrees the first will be more active, but the second will be active to some degree. At 10 degrees, you are favoring the second with a bit of the first and at 12 degrees you are basically only having the second active.
As I said, proteins are long chains. It's a bit like a puzzle. If you get enzyme one super active and enzyme two only a little bit active, the resultant peptides and amino acids you get out the other side will be completely different than if you go the other way around. This is because the first enzyme may split the proteins in a way that make it impossible for the second enzyme to work on the remaining piece. So you can get a situation where at one temp you will break down the proteins all into amino acids, but at another temperature you will end up with a lot of peptides. This may be good, or it may be bad depending on the flavour of the peptides and amino acids in question.
So basically for short periods it doesn't make that much difference to the flavour profile what temperature you age the cheese, but over a long period it has the potential to completely change it. Having said that, Jobe from Jobe's cheese lab on Youtube did an experiment where he tried to age a parmesan style cheese for a few months at room temperature and it seemed to work quite well. So there are definitely places where you can get away with it. Some other cheeses like scamorza or cacio cavello were almost certainly aged at higher temps traditionally and Gavin Webber has aged a cacio cavello at the temperatures you are talking about with some success as well. I've also heard of people aging gouda at higher temps and it working out well. YMMV.
Thanks for the detailed reply, and you basically confirmed what I had already suspected from all my cheese readings. I brew small batches of beer and ferment all kinds of foods at home, and it works the same way, the temperature is a huge factor in the flavor provided by the efforts of whatever organisms are doing the work for me. The only cheeses I could find in Caldwell that actually like warmer temps for any time are those long aged hard cheeses that I will probably never make. I guess I was hoping that some creative risk taking amateurs had found a few that worked, but then I suppose those creative risk takers would have discovered what worked centuries ago and founded cheese dynasties in some village in the 'old' countries;) I think I will have to recognize that I'm lucky in that using little coolers is much easier in a low temperature room, and I can save up for a little wine cooler cheese cave in the apartment.