The ‘World’s Stinkiest Cheese’ Is Promoting Out at Grocery Shops All over the place

Smelly cheese is a divisive food. So it stands that the stinkiest cheese in the world may be the most divisive of all.

Minger, a washed-rind cheese from Scotland’s Highland Fine Cheeses, is being billed as the worst-smelling cheese, period, The New York Times reported on Friday. But that superlative may also be making the dairy product a complete hit: Previously sold in just independent stores, it’s become widely available for the first time in the British supermarket Asda.

“Everybody is still asking for samples, and it just hasn’t stopped,” Rory Stone, a cheesemaker at Highland, told the Times. “And I find it really bizarre. I mean, it is a smelly cheese, but it is quite a lovely flavor. So the only problem now is I’ve run out of cheese.”

Stone started selling Minger seven years ago, and it became a hit with smelly cheese lovers, even winning awards like best specialty cheese at the 2019 Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh. The cheese has a “cabbagey” smell, according to Stone, but that isn’t reflected in its taste. Rather, the smooth product leans more toward the “minty” side, he said.

Minger wasn’t devised to be the smelliest cheese of all, and Stone contends that it’s what a washed-rind option should smell like. He himself didn’t even begin to brand the cheese that way; someone else called it the most putrid, and Stone simply ran with it. But he is aware that Minger may not actually be the smelliest cheese on the planet.

“I think it was like a throwaway line, because you can’t prove something like that,” Stone said. “You can’t qualify it. We know it smells, and we know it’s not very nice. But to say it’s the smelliest cheese in the world is a bit of a struggle, but you can’t disprove it. So I suppose we can get away with saying it, and that seems to be what has lit the firework.”

Stinky cheeses have been around for centuries, with Trappist monks in Belgium creating the pungent Limburger in the 1800s, The New York Times noted. In Paris, the odoriferous Éppoisses is banned on public transit because of its fumes. And in 2004, researchers in Britain declared the French Vieux-Boulogne to be the smelliest cheese in the world. “I think that there are a small group of people out there that just love” odorous cheese, Mark Johnson, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research, told the Times. “It’s almost like an ‘I dare you to eat it’ kind of thing, like hot peppers.”