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Hi,  My name is Joanna and I live in Jamaica where I have a small herd of Nubians.  I make and sell chevre, feta, mozzarella, ricotta, yogurt, quark and a bloomy rind cheese.  (I have named my bloomy rind cheese after the little hamlet we live in and call it the Tom's Hope.) 

I have been ripening it in an old fridge regulated to stay at 54 degrees.  I have to put it in plastic boxes to keep it humid enough but can only fit in 3 dozen at a time, not enough to keep up with the demand since it takes 3 weeks to ripen.  Next season I want to use a 20 cu ft freezer instead and am debating whether to get a humidifier or just go with a small towel in a bowl of water.  I'd like to eliminate the boxes because caring for the cheese would be easier if I could have it on racks.  But I'm worried about getting a build-up of condensation on the lid of the freezer which would drip onto the cheese.

Any ideas or experiences with this?  It would be greatly appreciated.

Joanna in Jamaica

Hi Joanna

I know where many posts are so dug out a couple links for you:

• Here is DaggerDoggie's negative experience with small chest freezer and here's my experience, gave up and sold it the other day.
• Here's Carter's experiences with an upright freezer and another try here, got condensation dripping on his cheeses.
• Here's Wayne's good experience with a commercial sized fridge.
• Lastly, there's a bunch of more detailed Cheese Cave Report type info in our Library from linuxboy.

Hope helps, lots more info in this forum!

Thank you so much John.  That'a a BIG help.
Joanna

Welcome, actually, it is such a popular and important topic that I just created a Board just for Cheese Caves, Humidity & Temp Measurement and Control Devices and moved most of the ones I could find there .

The easy part is making the cheese the hard part is aging and caring for it properly!

Hi Joanna-welcome to the forum. You certainly live in a beautiful country. I haven't been there since the 70's so I am sure that there have been many changes since then. You sound like you are already quite accomplished in you cheese making with the variety that you make. I won't add to the plethora of information that John has placed in the new cave board, I'll only add that Debi is correct, it's all in the aging!