As soon as he opened the overhead locker that pong so familiar to Rory Stone’s nostrils started wafting through the cabin.
Passengers glanced round in his direction, a new sense of urgency to disembark written on every face.
What was that smell? Prime suspect Mr Stone affected innocence as the bag he removed from stowage was eyed suspiciously.
Luckily this flight was a short hop to Luton. The cheese dubbed the world’s smelliest had only just begun to permeate its environment.
Its influence on a long-haul flight may be best left to the imagination.
The King’s expression seems to say it all
![The world's stinkiest cheese! The Minger - created by professional cheesemaker Rory Stone.](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/12/09/19/78748673-12843047-The_world_s_stinkiest_cheese_The_Minger_created_by_professional_-a-104_1702148812830.jpg)
The world’s stinkiest cheese! The Minger – created by professional cheesemaker Rory Stone.
![Scottish Daily Mail's Jonathan Brocklebank samples the pungent Minger cheese](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/12/09/19/78748671-12843047-Scottish_Daily_Mail_s_Jonathan_Brocklebank_samples_the_pungent_M-a-106_1702148812832.jpg)
Scottish Daily Mail’s Jonathan Brocklebank samples the pungent Minger cheese
In the years after Highland cheesemaker Mr Stone unleashed his most pungent product on the market it became a cult favourite whose reputation – inevitably – went before it.
Only, perhaps, by clipping a clothes peg over the nose before tasting could it be any other way.
But it was not just the smell – which Mr Stone happily admits is offensive – that kept it out of the mainstream.
More obnoxious still in the eyes of industry buyers was the name its creator chose: Minger.
‘Change it,’ the experts told him. ‘The name stays,’ he replied.
The deadlock looked set to keep Minger off major supermarket shelves and posh restaurant menus indefinitely – until last week, when Asda decided to take a punt on it.
This week, it is probably the most talked about cheese on the planet. Now neither the smell nor the name is the problem.
The biggest issue is figuring out how on earth to keep up with demand.
Production is about to rise from 30 tons of the cheese a year to 70, putting Mr Stone’s Tain-based business at full stretch.
‘If any other retailer takes it on then we’re really going to have to scratch our heads,’ he says.
He well remembers his run-in with Waitrose which, as a ‘family supermarket’, refused to countenance such a name appearing in its stores.
Upmarket cheesemonger Paxton & Whitfield was similarly sniffy.
‘They said we love the cheese but we cannot pass that over to Michelin-starred restaurants,’ recalls Mr Stone, 59.
‘They said there’s no way, it’s tacky, it’s crass, you’re closing more marketplaces down than you’re opening.’
In one upmarket Scottish restaurant which did put the cheese on its tasting menu, a printing error left the name a letter short.
Even Mr Stone, who defends Minger to the hilt, was horrified by this.
One distinguished patron who has not expressed a view – though has certainly taken delivery of Minger – is the King.
Charles visited Mr Stone’s business Highland Fine Cheeses a decade ago before this most controversial product was created but, ever since, the cheesemaker has sent a selection to the Castle of Mey in Caithness whenever the King is staying there.
Minger is invariably included and, though it remains unclear whether His Majesty had tried it, there have certainly been no complaints.
The same cannot be said for Mr Stone’s wife Jacqui who disapproved not only of her husband’s name for this cheese but also with his choice of nomenclature for other signature products including Fat Cow and Blue Murder.
‘It caused many an argument and we have decided that in order to keep our marriage going it’s best that we don’t try to work together,’ admits father of two Mr Stone.
‘She said it will be disastrous, it will be embarrassing for the children.
She kept finding urban dictionary definitions and saying “absolutely not, you cannot call it that”.’
But he did – and this week the malodorous product with the equally disagreeable name was flying off the shelves.
Mr Stone says the initial Scottish stores-only deal with Asda is being extended to the rest of the UK – and now an agreement with Morrisons is in the pipeline too. Minger, the ugly duckling of the cheese world, is suddenly a swan.
It started innocuously enough when Asda issued a routine announcement about its new line of artisan products for this year’s festive cheeseboards.
These would include Fat Cow, Blue Murder and Minger, which it described – somewhat diplomatically – as ‘a pungent cheese and runny when ripe’.
The supermarket offered no comment on the name that had kept it on the margins for so long.
Within hours, Minger was making headlines across the UK as the world’s smelliest cheese – pongier than the infamous Stinking Bishop made in Gloucestershire; whiffier even than Époisses, from Burgundy, which was notoriously banned from the Paris Metro following complaints from passengers.
The cheesemaker from Tain, Ross-shire, was coaxed down to London for a round of broadcast interviews, which is why he found himself on an easyJet flight with a bag packed with ripening Minger samples and queasy passengers all around.
While there, the media requests kept coming: a drivetime slot on Australian radio; an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. Everyone wanted to know about Minger.
So what is the story of the cheese that has risen to glory in spite of beginnings which marketing wisdom suggests should have seen it sink without a trace?
Well, part of it, surely, is the delight which its genial producer takes in giving its aroma a bad press.
‘It’s a bit obnoxious,’ he tells me. ‘You are kicking the dog or checking out grandpa to make sure he’s still with us – it’s not good.’
‘It smells like something’s gone badly,’ he was quoted elsewhere as saying.
‘There’s nothing subtle here and no nice way to describe the smell – it’s simply bad,’ was another of his scathing reviews of his own work.
He describes the odour as ‘unctuous’, ‘cabbagey’, even ‘vile’ and warns against travelling with it for too long in the car, particularly in warm weather.
‘That’s when you go “Oh no, there’s something not right here”,’ he laughs.
He receives reports of domestic strife over his whiffiest concoction – spouses refusing to have it in the fridge and insisting that it is either consumed immediately or binned outside.
But another part of the story, as almost all who have tried it agree, is it tastes nothing like it smells. Indeed, the contrast between its assault on the nose and the subtle pleasures it brings to the palate is widely admired by the cheese cognoscenti.
At George Mewes Cheese in Glasgow’s Byres Road, where Minger has been selling steadily for more than a year, cheesemonger Andrew Barrett says it is one of his favourites.
‘It’s a really nice cheese whose name is a lot worse than its bite,’ he says. ‘It’s got a lovely peanutty flavour.
We do a Scottish cheeseboard selection and it’s one of the superstars of that.
‘It’s one of those funky washed rind cheeses that you’re normally used to seeing coming out of the Champagne region of France.’
And yet, he says, it is that name which accounts for a substantial proportion of the sales, particularly in the festive season.
‘A lot of people buy it for pals as a joke because it’s a minging cheese,’ he says.
Is it really the smelliest in the shop? He looks doubtful. ‘Of the Scottish ones, definitely.’
Minger’s creator says that it was born following a conversation with Scottish chef Nick Nairn. ‘He said to me, “You know, at the end of dinner when the cheese board comes out, I’m looking for that little, gooey smelly bit of joy that’s trying to get off the plate.”
‘I thought, well, me too, because I love Reblochon and Epoisses.
I adore those flavours and smells and of course the aroma is horrendously off-putting but the taste is to die for.’
Shortly afterwards, rifling in the back of a chiller, Mr Stone found a sample of brie that was so far past its best it had begun to morph into a different kind of cheese entirely.
It was developing the brevibacterium typical of washed rind cheeses and – rank as it smelled – he just had to try some.
‘I thought, “Oh my God, I love that.” I’ve always been trying to get our cow’s milk cheeses to develop those flavours.”
And so the ambition crystallised: a washed rind Scottish cheese that made no apologies for its stinkiness. In fact, he decided, he would call it Minger.
By then, Mr Stone’s taste for colourful names was already legion in cheesemaking circles.
In partnership with Alex James of the rock group Blur, his firm had produced a cheese called Blue Monday.
When the two parties went their separate ways, James registered the brand name and threatened to sue when Mr Stone kept using it.
‘My lawyer said it should be Blue Murder because it was costing quite a lot of money to fend him off. And I thought, yeah, I’ll go for that… and for some reason the West of Scotland just loved it. They immediately made a connection with Taggart.’
As for Minger, well, the name appears to have done little to discourage Asda customers. They were sold out in the branch I visited.
And so my own square of the stuff came from George Mewes Cheeses together with the ‘fun fact’ that its bright orange rind cultivates the same bacteria which forms in your shower if you don’t clean it.
Brevibacterium accounts for smelly feet, too.
Back home I gingerly removed the outer packaging and prepared for the assault on the nostrils which, when it came seconds later, was brutal yet less so than I had feared.
Rather more disturbing was the sight of the creamy goo breaching its rind and oozing along the cheeseboard, almost as if it were alive.
If the intention was to create a cheese which gave the diner the impression it was trying to escape, Mr Stone had certainly succeeded.
Cutting a corner off, I noted this chunk was trying to flee my cheese knife, but I swiftly smeared it over an oatcake, took a bite and at once experienced the magic.
There were hints of lemon, a mild nuttiness and – yes – I could taste what the experts at the cheesemonger had described as ‘flavours of the farmyard’.
What I couldn’t taste was anything that I could square with the pong now establishing itself in my kitchen.
‘That sounds exactly right,’ says Mr Stone when I report back. ‘Are you keeping it in the fridge? Is there a whiff coming as soon as you open the door?’
When I tell him it is well wrapped up and not causing any undue offence he advises me that this is clearly quite a young cheese with maturing still to do.
Indeed, the ‘use by’ date of December 27 confirms it.
By Christmas Day, he says, it will be at its peak.
In the interim, there are questions to ponder after a week that turned conventional thinking about artisan Scottish cheese on its head.
How does a small Highland firm employing 12 people cater for supermarket-scale demand for a product which, until a few days ago, was not even its own biggest seller?
Was its name, ultimately, a help or a hindrance? ‘In the beginning it slammed many more doors shut than it opened,’ says Mr Stone. Now he is not so sure.
![Deadly on the nose, Rory Stone, creator of the ‘world’s stinkiest cheese’](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/12/09/19/78748705-12843047-Deadly_on_the_nose_Rory_Stone_creator_of_the_world_s_stinkiest_c-a-105_1702148812831.jpg)
Deadly on the nose, Rory Stone, creator of the ‘world’s stinkiest cheese’
And how was it that Asda – not perhaps the most noted of suppliers of artisan cheeses – managed to steal a march on its rivals, winning global publicity into the bargain?
‘Asda, of all people,’ laughs Mr Stone. ‘I mean, really? What have they brought to speciality cheese?
‘I would imagine what they have gained from this is every other buyer is sitting in their office cowering at the moment, waiting for somebody to kick in their door and say, “Why didn’t you do this?”’
‘I don’t think that can be bad news for us.’
The sweet smell of success, it turns out, can just as easily be a stink.