Minger is a soft washed-rind cheese from the Scottish Highlands, and the name is a warning the maker chose on purpose.
It comes from Highland Fine Cheeses in Tain, arrives as a 250 g square with a damp orange rind, and turns runny and strongly aromatic as it ripens.
The unusual part is the construction. It is built like a brie and finished like a washed rind, which is not a combination most creameries attempt.
In This Article
Why a Scottish Creamery Named Its Cheese Minger
In Scots slang a minger is something pungent, and nobody at the creamery was being subtle.
The cheese comes from the Stone family at Highland Fine Cheeses, a small-batch creamery working from Blarliath Farm in Tain, Ross-shire.
Rory Stone has described the smell as a pungent aroma of welly boot, which is a more honest tasting note than most producers would print.
The reputation was then confirmed from outside.
Researchers at Cranfield University once named Minger the world's smelliest cheese, a verdict the creamery has been happy to live with rather than argue against.
Take the name as information rather than as a joke. It tells you what will happen to your kitchen when you unwrap it, and it sets expectations that the flavour then comfortably beats.
A Brie Shape With a Washed Rind
The creamery describes it as a brie-style cheese carrying a soft washed rind, and that combination is the whole design rather than a marketing line.
A brie normally ripens under a white bloom that keeps things mild, while a washed rind is scrubbed with brine to encourage the bacteria that make cheeses smell.
The high moisture is what makes that pairing awkward to pull off. A soft paste under an actively washed rind can move from ripe to collapsed within a few days, which is why the total maturation stays short.
Minger takes the soft, high-moisture body of the first and finishes it with the second.
The result is a 250 g square block rather than a round, made from pasteurized milk collected from farms around Tain.
The creamery even markets it as a meaty protein substitute, which sounds odd for a cheese until you taste the savoury depth the rind treatment builds.
Annatto in the Brine, Not Just Bacteria
Most washed rinds get their orange from surface bacteria alone, and how deep that colour runs is one of the few things a shopper can read off the outside of the block. This one gets help.
The rind is washed every other day in a brine carrying both salt and annatto, the orange colouring drawn from achiote tree seeds.
That is a deliberate shortcut to a particular look. The bacterial activity still does the aromatic work, while the annatto guarantees a consistent orange rather than leaving the colour entirely to how the flora behave in a given batch.
It matters when you are judging a piece at the counter.
On a traditional washed rind, colour depth is a rough clock for age and surface activity, but here part of that colour arrived in the brine, so the rind tells you less than usual and the give under your thumb tells you more.
The Three-Week Timetable From Wash to Wrap
The schedule is short and specific. Washing runs for 13 days, every other day, before the cheese is wrapped and left for roughly a further week.
Total maturation lands at about three weeks.
Three weeks is brief for a washed rind, and it shows in the cheese.
The paste stays soft and high in moisture rather than developing the dense chew of a longer-matured square, and the aroma arrives fast rather than building over months.
That short cycle also explains the dating. A cheese this young keeps changing in the shop and in your fridge, so two blocks bought a fortnight apart will not behave identically.
What It Tastes Like When It Is Ready
The aroma reaches you first and it is earthy and farmyard rather than sour.
What follows on the palate is milder than the nose predicts. It opens buttery and milky, then deepens into a meaty, tangy richness with earthy undertones, and the creamery adds mildly nutty and lemony notes to that.
Butter and mushroom is the pairing of flavours people most often reach for when describing it.
Texture is the ripeness cue that actually matters. The paste turns soft and silky and then runny as it matures, so a block that slumps when cut is ready rather than spoiled.
At full ripeness the creamery calls it decadently pungent, which is the point at which people either commit or trim the rind.
Judge by give rather than by date. Press the top gently through the wrapper, and a square that yields across the whole face is at the stage most people enjoy.
Trim the rind if the smell defeats you, but taste it before you do. The rind carries most of the meaty savour, and a trimmed block eats closer to a plain soft brie than to the cheese the name promised.
Keeping the Smell Inside the Fridge
Store it below 5 degrees Celsius and treat the wrapper as containment rather than decoration.
The creamery recommends keeping it wrapped and using zip-seal bags specifically to hold the aroma in, which is unusual advice to see printed by a cheesemaker and entirely justified here.
Open it and the clock changes. Highland Fine Cheeses gives roughly four weeks refrigerated for an unopened block but only five days once you have cut into it, so buy the size you will finish rather than the size that looks like better value.
Freezing is possible if you have overbought.
It costs you some of the silkiness that makes the cheese worth eating, so treat it as a rescue rather than a plan.
Keep it away from butter and milk on the same shelf. A cheese described by its own maker as smelling of welly boot will pass that on to anything unsealed nearby.
Bag it twice for a long drive home. A warm car pushes the ripening along and the smell finds its way out of a single wrapper within the hour, which is how a block ends up unwelcome before anyone has tasted it.
What to Drink With It
Sweetness and malt handle it better than anything dry and delicate. That is a rule about the rind rather than the paste, because the salt and the farmyard aroma both sit on the surface where the brine did its work.
A malty ale or a cider gives the salt and the farmyard note something to work against, while a light dry white leaves the aroma standing exposed on its own.
Local habit points at whisky, and a gentle unpeated Highland dram sits comfortably beside it. A heavily peated bottle turns the pairing into a contest rather than a match.
Serve the drink cold and the cheese barely cool. Straight from the fridge the paste holds its aroma shut in and tastes of very little, and twenty minutes on the counter opens both.
The Creamery That Started in a Bathtub
Highland Fine Cheeses did not set out to be a business at all.
Susannah Stone farmed near Tain and had made crowdie, the simple fresh Highland cheese, her whole life. Her husband Reggie complained that nobody made it commercially any more, and she took that as a challenge.
She soured a ten gallon churn of milk in the family bath.
Ten gallons produced considerably more cheese than Reggie had in mind, so in 1962 the surplus went to a local grocer and the couple began selling crowdie commercially under the name the creamery still carries.
Rory Stone joined his mother and older brother in the business in 1994 and has led it since, keeping the small-batch approach and, in the creamery own phrase, choosing flavour over convention.
The range now runs well past crowdie. Black Crowdie, Caboc, Morangie and Highland Brie, Strathdon Blue, Blue Murder, Fat Cow, and Minger all come from the same Tain operation.
Those names tell you the house temperament. A creamery that revived the oldest cheese in Scotland and also sells something called Blue Murder is not aiming at the middle of the market.
What to Use Instead of Minger
Match the washed-rind character first, because that is what the cheese is for. A substitute that gets the softness right and the smell wrong will not do the job you bought Minger to do.
- Closest in style: Munster, another soft washed rind with real aroma and a supple paste
- Closest in force: Maroilles, squarer, older, and built on the same brine logic
- If you want more smell: Limburger takes the aroma further than most people expect
- If you want the texture only: a ripe brie gives the ooze without the rind character
- Wrong direction: any hard aged cheese, which shares neither the moisture nor the surface flavour
None of them will taste Scottish, and none carries the annatto-tinted rind.
What they can reproduce is the job the cheese does on a plate, which is to bring aroma and savoury depth that a mild cheese cannot.
Buy the substitute at the same stage rather than the same size. A young Munster or an underripe Maroilles is firm and quiet, and it will read as a mistake next to the ripe, slumping block you were trying to replace.
