Flipping, Brushing & Washing
Three verbs, and they are not variations on one another. They do different jobs, they suit different cheeses, and the commonest mistake in a home cave is doing one of them when the wheel was asking for a different one — or, more often, doing whichever one you read about last to every cheese on the shelf.
Turning keeps a wheel symmetrical. Brushing keeps a rind under control. Washing builds a rind that would not otherwise exist.
Everything below follows from that.
Turning: the one that is not optional
Every wheel in the cave gets turned, whatever kind it is.
Why: as the previous page explains, a wheel is losing moisture outward the entire time it is aging. The face resting on a shelf cannot evaporate; the face in the air can. Leave it alone and you get a permanently damp underside — flat, sometimes sticky, often the first place something unwanted takes hold — and an over-dried top.
Turning is how you make the drying symmetrical. It also evens out mould and smear growth on the rind, which for a surface-ripened cheese is the difference between a rind and a patchwork.
How often depends on the family, and this collection’s own make pages already say, so here they are in one place:
| Family | Cadence | Where the make page says so |
|---|---|---|
| Bloomy rind | Daily, from the mould until the coat sets | soft-ripened |
| Blue, first weeks | Daily through the rest before piercing | blue and mould-ripened |
| Washed rind | Every other day, with the wash | washed rind |
| Grating and extra-hard | Weekly, with a brush | grating and extra-hard |
| Alpine, hard-pressed | Weekly, wash or brush as the rind asks | alpine |
The pattern is worth naming: the wetter the cheese and the more alive the rind, the more often it gets turned. A young bloomy is daily; a two-year grana is weekly and mostly wants to be left alone.
And in the press, before any of this, a wheel gets flipped too — early and often, because that is when the curd is still consolidating and an unturned wheel sets crooked. That is a making problem rather than a cave problem, but it is the same principle arriving earlier.
Why I automated it
Turning is also the reason there are motors in my aging fridge. The short version, since that page makes the argument properly: turning and door-opening are two schedules that have no business being linked. Opening the door once or twice a day is good for air exchange; opening it eight times to turn eight wheels on eight different cadences is not. Motorising the turning decoupled them, and it let each shelf keep its own schedule — daily on one rod, weekly on another.
I want to be clear that this is a convenience rather than a requirement. Twelve years of hand-turning would have produced the same cheese. It would just have produced it with a lot more door-opening, and with the wheels that needed daily attention quietly getting weekly attention instead, which is the honest failure mode of a manual schedule.
Brushing: control without disturbance
Brushing is for a natural rind — the crust that forms when you let a wheel dry and let whatever is in your cave’s air colonise it.
What a brush is actually for: knocking back the growth that appears on top of the crust, without disturbing the crust itself. A natural rind is supposed to be a slightly rough, dry, greyish-brown surface with its own resident flora. What you are removing is the loose fuzz that grows over it — not the rind.
How: a soft dry brush, or a brush dipped in brine if the surface needs more persuading. Turn the wheel, brush it, put it back the other way up. Weekly is the usual cadence on a hard wheel, and the rind-treatment page has the fuller account of natural rinds against the alternatives — wax, bandaging, oil, and a spice crust.
Brushing does a second job people don’t expect: it is the main hands-on control for mites, which eat mould and live on rinds and are the one cave problem I would most warn a new maker about.
🔴 One brush per rind type, and brush somewhere else
This is small, cheap, and the sort of thing that quietly ruins a shelf.
A brush is a vector. Penicillium roqueforti spores travel enthusiastically, and a brush that has touched a blue and then touches a cheddar has just inoculated the cheddar. Keep separate brushes for blues and for everything else, and wash them.
And brush away from the cave, over a sink or in another room. Brushing a mould-covered wheel inside the cave puts everything you just removed into the air of the room the rest of your cheese is sitting in. This is the specific advice the cheese-mite literature gives, and the reasoning generalises to every kind of surface growth.
Washing: building a rind that would not otherwise be there
Washing is not brushing with liquid. It is a different operation with a different goal: you are feeding a bacterial smear and keeping the surface wet enough and salty enough for it to outcompete everything else.
A washed rind gets wiped with a brine — sometimes with beer, wine, marc or cider in it — every other day, at around 95% RH, for weeks. That is a demanding specification, and it is the one job in the whole cave where a controlled box earns its keep over a basement shelf.
⚠ And here is the finding that matters most, which the washed-rind pages establish and I will not restate at length: Brevibacterium linens cannot start on a cheese fresh out of the mould. It wants a surface pH around 5.5, and a cheese leaves the mould nearer 4.9. So the first fortnight of “washing for B. linens” is really a yeast schedule — Debaryomyces, Geotrichum — consuming lactic acid and raising the surface pH until the bacterium you actually want can get going.
Which is why a rind that is still white at two weeks is on schedule, and why the three real causes of “it never went orange” are: no yeast in the wash, too much salt, or giving up at two weeks. The wash itself is a recipe, and the makes page is where the argument lives.
I have not made a washed rind. That is stated plainly on the makes page and I am not going to blur it here: everything in this section is research and reasoning rather than my own shelf. The turning and the brushing I can speak to from twelve years of doing them. The washing I cannot.
Which one does this cheese want?
The short decision, and it is nearly always answered by the rind you chose at the press rather than by anything you observe later:
| If the wheel is… | Turn | Brush | Wash |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waxed or vacuum-bagged | Yes — less often, but yes | No. The wax is a seal, not a rind | No |
| Bandaged | Weekly | Lightly, if growth gets ahead | No |
| Natural rind | Weekly | Yes — this is the one brushing is for | Only if you meant to make a washed rind |
| Bloomy | Daily | No — you would remove the coat you are growing | No |
| Washed rind | With each wash | No | Yes, every other day |
The row that catches people is the waxed one. A waxed wheel still needs turning — the moisture gradient inside it does not care that the outside is sealed — but there is nothing on its surface to brush and nothing to feed.
Keep a tag on the wheel
Unglamorous, and it is the practice that has saved me the most grief.
Every wheel gets a label with what it is, the date it went in, and what it is on — turn daily, turn weekly, wash Tuesdays and Fridays. Six months later you will not remember, and a shelf of anonymous beige discs is a shelf you cannot manage. If you make more than one batch of the same thing, the date is what tells you which experiment worked.
Next: problems in the cave — what to do when the ecosystem starts winning.
Sources
- Per-family cadences are the ones this collection’s own make pages give: soft-ripened bloomy, blue, washed rind, grating and extra-hard, alpine.
- Natural-rind brushing practice, and the wax/bandage/natural/washed comparison: rind treatment, which carries its own sources.
- Brushing away from the cave, and the brush as a vector: New England Cheesemaking Supply Company, “Why Cheese Mites” — https://cheesemaking.com/blogs/fun-along-the-whey/why-cheese-mites
- B. linens surface-pH requirement and the yeast-first schedule: the washed-rind makes page and rinds and moulds.
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