Auld Reekie is a smoked Scottish cheese from the Cambus O'May dairy on Royal Deeside, and the thing most people want to know about it is whether there is whisky in it.
There is not. What the cheese meets is whisky barrel wood, in a smokehouse, long after the curd has been made.
That distinction turns out to explain almost everything about how it tastes.
In This Article
What Is Auld Reekie?
The name is the old nickname for Edinburgh, literally "old smoky", earned when the city ran on coal fires. Applying it to a smoked cheese is a Scottish joke about a Scottish city, not a claim about where the cheese comes from.
It is made at the Cambus O'May creamery near Ballater, inside the Cairngorms National Park, from the dairy's own unpasteurised cow milk.
The dairy launched it around 2010 as one of two new products, alongside a range it had already built on family recipes.
Traditional animal rennet sets the curd, as with the rest of the range, so it is not a vegetarian cheese.
What Does Smoking Over Whisky Barrels Actually Do?
The dairy burns shavings from old whisky barrels rather than plain wood chips, and that single substitution is the whole recipe difference between this cheese and a generic smoked one.
A spent barrel is oak that has been charred on the inside and then held spirit for years. Both of those leave the wood carrying compounds that plain kiln-dried chips do not have.
When that wood smoulders, the smoke picks those up and lays them on the surface of whatever is hanging above it.
The smoking is cold, which matters more than it sounds. A hot smoke would start to cook the paste and sweat out fat; a cold one only flavours the outside and leaves the texture alone.
So the whisky note in the finished cheese is real, but it is second-hand. It arrives through wood and smoke rather than through anything poured onto the curd.
The order of operations is the other thing worth holding onto. The cheese is made and matured first, and only then hung in the smokehouse, so smoking is a finishing step rather than part of the recipe.
That means the smoke has a fully formed rind and paste to work on, and it does not get far. Cold smoke penetrates a few millimetres and then stops.
Which is why the shape of the piece decides how smoky your mouthful is. A tall truckle has more surface for its volume than a squat wheel, so more of it ends up carrying smoke.
Smoked cheeses are often coloured rather than smoked, with a dye and a smoke flavouring applied to the surface. A genuinely cold-smoked cheese shows a gradient: dark at the surface, fading over a few millimetres into an undarkened interior. A uniform colour right through is the tell.
What Does Auld Reekie Taste Like?
A smoked cheese is usually described by its smoke alone, which misses the thing that makes a good one worth buying. This arrives as oak and peat first, then the cheese underneath, then a tang at the very end.
That order is the test. Smoke that arrives and stays is a flavouring; smoke that arrives and then hands over to the paste is smoke that went on a real cheese.
The smoke reads as woody rather than bacony, which is the usual difference between cold smoke over hardwood and the hot smoke used on a lot of supermarket cheese.
Under it the paste is firm and crumbly and recognisably from the same dairy as the rest of the range, with the same fresh finish.
Because the smoke lives at the surface, a thick chunk eats milder than a thin slice off the outside. The cut decides the intensity as much as the cheese does.
If a piece tastes flatly smoky all the way through with no gradient, that is worth a second look. It usually means flavouring rather than smoke.
Is the Whisky Note Actually There?
This is the question the name invites and the one most likely to disappoint someone who takes it literally. The whisky note is there faintly, and it helps to know what to look for rather than expecting a dram in cheese form.
What passes from a barrel into smoke is what the wood absorbed over years of holding spirit, which is a narrow slice of what whisky tastes like.
Vanilla and a slight sweetness are the parts that carry, because both come from the oak itself rather than from the distillate.
What comes through is the oak and the char, which is the same wood character a whisky itself picks up from its barrel. The cheese and the spirit share a source rather than one containing the other.
Anyone hoping for sweetness, or for the specific fruit of a particular distillery, will not find it. Barrel wood carries the woody half of a whisky's flavour, not the spirit half.
What Should You Drink With It?
Whisky is the obvious answer and it is a good one, but the choice within whisky is what decides whether the pairing works.
A heavily peated Islay will simply meet smoke with more smoke, and the cheese disappears underneath it.
A Speyside or a Highland with some sweetness does the opposite, giving the smoke something to play against instead of something to compete with.
A heavily peated Islay will simply run over the cheese, since both are then competing to be the smoky thing on the table. A gentler sherried or Speyside dram leaves the cheese room to be tasted.
Beyond whisky, anything with sweetness against the smoke works: a chutney, a slice of apple, or a dark beer with some malt behind it.
| Pairing | Type | Why It Works |
|---|---|---|
| Auld Reekie + Speyside whisky | Drink | The safest dram. Sweetness and light oak sit beside the smoke instead of fighting it for the same ground. |
| Auld Reekie + sherried whisky | Drink | Dried fruit against smoke, which is the same logic as chutney but in a glass. |
| Avoid: heavily peated Islay | Drink | Two smoky things competing. The cheese loses, because the whisky arrives with more of everything. |
| Auld Reekie + oatcakes | Bread | Plain and rough. Oat texture suits a crumbly paste and adds nothing that argues with the smoke. |
| Auld Reekie + apple or chutney | Fruit | Sweetness is what smoke wants beside it. A spoonful of chutney does the same job as the fruit. |
How Should You Store It?
Storing a smoked cheese well is mostly the same as storing any other, with one problem that is specific to it. Keep it in paper rather than plastic, and remember that the smoke travels.
Smoke compounds are volatile and they move into whatever is beside them, which is why a smoked cheese left loose in a fridge makes butter and milk taste of it within a day.
A smoked cheese left unwrapped in a fridge will lend its smell to butter and milk within a day or two.
Wrap it in waxed or greaseproof paper, then put that inside a box you do not seal tight, and keep it on the warmest shelf.
What Can You Use Instead?
The substitution question here is really a question about which half of the cheese you were buying, since the smoke and the paste are separable in a way they are not in most cheeses.
For the paste alone, the dairy makes an unsmoked cheese from the same milk, and a firm cheddar of similar age gets close enough.
For the smoke without the whisky barrels, the Dutch smoked wheel is the common supermarket version and the plain style behind it shows how much the smoking adds.
For the smoke on a Scottish paste, the closest thing is the same dairy's unsmoked aged cheese with a smoked cheddar alongside it, which gets you both halves separately.
For a smoked cheese generally, an oak-smoked West Country cheddar is far easier to find and much cheaper, though it will be sweeter and less tangy underneath.
Avoid anything labelled smoke-flavoured. Smoke flavouring goes into the curd instead of onto the finished wheel, and the giveaway is a colour that runs all the way through.
The milk is unpasteurised, which puts this cheese under raw-milk cheese guidance regardless of the smoking.
SOURCES & REFERENCES
Auld Reekie FAQ
Two things the name and the smoke raise.
No. Nothing is added to the curd. The cheese is cold smoked over shavings from spent whisky barrels, so the whisky character reaches it through oak and smoke rather than through the spirit itself.
No. Nothing about the cheese comes from Edinburgh; the name borrows the city's old nickname because the cheese is smoked. It is made near Ballater on Deeside, well over a hundred miles north.
