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.

Good luck hope it turns out.

Green Cheese Maker - 21 February 2009 03:22 PM

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.

Is this not the wrong way round?
I always thought the idea of draining whey/adding hot water was to reduce the amount of acid leading to a milder cheese.
Could be wrong?

I see your confusion.  What I’m getting at is that if you drain off too much, it then takes far less hot water to increase the temp, resulting in LESS volume of liquid.  So in that respect, you would not want to drain off so much so that you are adding MORE.  Is my logic faulty here?