My first Gouda was a delightfully mild cheese, which my non-cheese loving wife truly enjoyed. So I made another. But this second one was incredibly sharp, and only a few people could really appreciate it. I couldn’t figure out why it happened, but I may have stumbled onto the answer today while making another Gouda. It occurred to me that If I drained off too much whey, then the adding of hot water to raise the curd temp would have resulted in less volume of whey/water. This would have had the effect of keeping the acid level too high, and of course making the cheese sharper. So today I purposely added extra water mixed with cold in order to keep the liquid volume higher. We’ll see if it works out the way I’m thinking it should.