Academy of Cheese Level Two rewards connected knowledge: the milk, make, style and mellowing facts that felt like separate lists at Level One Associate now need to work together for every cheese you meet. The study angle here is the chain method. For each cheese you study, write one line per link — what animal, what make choices, which style family, what mellowing does, and how you would describe it in a structured tasting — then test that chain against a closely related cheese. Done consistently, revision becomes reasoning practice instead of re-reading.
From Associate recall to Member-level reasoning
Build every study session around one chain: milk, make, style, mellowing, tasting. Write the chain for a cheese, then for its closest relative, so facts attach to relationships instead of floating free.
The Academy of Cheese runs a four-level pathway — Level One Associate, Level Two Member, Level Three Fellow, and Master of Cheese — so Level Two is a step up the same staircase, not a new building. The practical consequence for study is combinatorial growth. Level One facts still matter, but at Level Two you need to connect them: a milk type implies a texture range, a make choice implies a rind family, a rind family implies an aroma direction. Isolated flashcards leave exactly those links untrained.
Make the chain concrete with one worked pass. Take a cloth-bound hard cheese: cow's milk, cooked and pressed curd, natural rind, long mellowing, dense texture, nutty flavour. Then take a lactic goat cheese and write the same five links. Differences pop out link by link — animal, set, rind, age, descriptor — and every difference is a fact with a place to live. Verify your chains against the Academy's professionally checked Cheese Library so errors are caught early, while they are cheap to fix.
Make and style: two questions that blur into one
Separate what the cheesemaker did — the make — from the family the cheese ends up in — its style. Name both explicitly in your notes, because the make explains why the cheese fits the style and the style predicts what you will taste.
The make covers the technical choices: which milk, how it is treated, whether cultures and rennet set a lactic or firmer curd, how the curd is cut, cooked, moulded and pressed, how it is salted, and how the rind is treated. The style is the resulting family — fresh and lactic, bloomy rind, washed rind, pressed, blue — grouped by shared observable features. Both are needed: a make without a style gives you process trivia, and a style without a make gives you a label you cannot justify.
The distinction earns its keep because different makes can converge on similar styles. A cheese can be pressed at make and still develop a washed rind through mellowing, so knowing only the word washed tells you nothing about moisture or texture. When you meet an unfamiliar cheese, run both questions in order: what did the maker do, and which family does that produce? Reasoning into a family this way is far more robust than trying to recognise a cheese by name.
Reading a rind: a decision table for five families
Use observable rind and paste cues to place an unknown cheese in a family before tasting. Sticky, orange-tinged and pungent points washed; bloomy is white, velvety and dry-looking; blues show veining; fresh means no rind at all.
Work the table from observation inward. Before tasting anything, note the rind's texture, colour and moisture, the aroma at the surface, and the paste colour just under the rind. Then match the pattern to a family and let the family drive your predictions about aroma, texture and how the cheese will behave on the plate.
Worked scenario: at a counter you find a cheese with a dusty white haze over an otherwise orange, tacky rind, a supple paste and a meaty aroma. The tempting call is bloomy rind because some white is present. The better decision is to weigh the whole pattern: stickiness, orange pigment and pungency are washed-rind signals, and surface yeasts can bloom whitely on washed cheeses. Placing it correctly in the washed family predicts the savoury, pungent profile; calling it bloomy would have you expecting mushroom and cream notes that never arrive.
| Family | What you observe | Typical make choices | What mellowing tends to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fresh / lactic | No real rind; moist, snow-white to ivory paste; clean lactic aroma | Little draining; quick salting; eaten young | Minimal; texture firms slightly as moisture is lost |
| Bloomy rind | White velvet coat; soft paste under the coat, sometimes runny near it | Mould applied at make; gentle, high-moisture make | Coat is eaten; interior softens from the edge inward |
| Washed rind | Sticky, glossy, orange to brick tones; pungent, savoury aroma | Surfaces washed during mellowing with brine or bacterial cultures | Washing drives colour, moisture retention and aroma strength |
| Natural rind | Dry, matte, grey-brown mottled coat; earthy aroma | Air-dried with brushing or turning; no added mould | Long mellowing deepens earthy, nutty notes and firms the paste |
| Blue | Veining through the paste, under a natural or foil-wrapped rind | Piercing admits air so the mould can grow through the paste | Veining spreads and softens the paste as it develops |
Mellowing: why age rewrites every other link in the chain
Mellowing — ripening and affinage — can override what milk and make seem to promise. Treat age as a variable: study the same cheese family young and mature, and note which descriptors change and which survive.
Mellowing is the link learners undertrain, because it is invisible from a label photo. Time in controlled temperature and humidity, with turning, brushing or washing, loses moisture and concentrates flavour, works microbes on the rind and interior, and steadily changes texture. A chain written without a mellowing line describes a cheese at only one moment of its life, so always record roughly how old the cheese is when you write the chain, and what that stage implies.
Worked scenario: you are reasoning about a goat cheese with a fawn-coloured, firm paste and nutty, hay-like flavour. The reflexive mistake is to file every goat cheese under fresh, white and citrusy, because that is the most familiar image. The better decision is to let mellowing reinterpret the milk: aged goat cheeses develop deeper colour, drier or firmer texture and nuttier, more animal notes while keeping the lactonic goaty signature. Getting this right changes your texture expectations, your descriptor choices, and which pairing directions make sense.
Tasting notes: descriptors, not intensity adjectives
Practise a structured note every time: appearance, texture, aroma, flavour. Swap vague intensity words like strong or mild for specific descriptors — lactic, nutty, hay, mushroom, caramel — because specific descriptors are checkable and comparable between cheeses.
Decide what belongs under each heading and keep it consistent. Appearance covers rind condition, paste colour and any openness or veining. Texture covers elasticity, crumbliness, creaminess and things like crunch from crystals. Aroma covers lactic, vegetal, animal and toasted families. Flavour covers the attack, the mid-palate, the finish, and the balance of salt, sweet and bitter. Whatever grid your course materials use, use it identically every time, so your notes can actually be compared across cheeses and across weeks.
Exercise: in one week, taste or closely observe three cheeses from three different families and write a full structured note for each, plus one sentence comparing any two. Expected observations: your appearance and texture lines should feel confident immediately; your aroma and flavour lines should improve across the week; and your comparison sentences should reference a chain link — make, mellowing or milk — rather than a preference. If all three comparisons come out as liking one cheese more, redo the exercise with the rind decision table in front of you.
Milk, feed and season: what the animal contributes
Cow, goat, sheep and buffalo milks each set a different baseline of fat, protein and flavour. Learn the baselines first, then treat feed and season as modifiers that move a cheese within its baseline rather than into a new one.
Anchor each baseline in what it produces. Cow's milk spans the widest range, from fresh lactic cheeses to long-aged hard ones. Sheep's milk tends to be richer in fat and solids, which supports dense, sweetly lactic cheeses. Goat's milk tends toward a bright, lactic profile with its own goaty signature, and buffalo milk brings a distinct creamy richness. Learn these tendencies with hedged language in your notes — tends to, often — because individual make and mellowing choices can push any milk a long way from its stereotype.
Then add the modifiers. What the animals eat, and the season, shift the milk itself: hay-fed winter milk and spring grass milk differ, and those shifts show up in the finished cheese. A related piece of context worth learning conceptually is protected designations, which legally tie some cheese names to place and method. For study purposes, learn what a designation does and does not guarantee rather than memorising long lists, and confirm the scope your Level Two materials actually require.
An adaptable study sequence and readiness checks
Use a six-week cycle: two weeks building chains family by family, two weeks adding mellowing and structured tasting, one week of mixed blind practice, one week of review. Adjust the pace to your calendar; keep the order, which front-loads structure.
The order matters more than the pace. Families first, because the decision table and family exemplars give every later fact somewhere to sit. Mellowing and tasting second, because they reinterpret the families you have just built. Mixed practice third, because an unknown cheese never announces its family, and only mixed, unlabelled practice trains the jump from observation to family. Review last, going back over your written chains and correcting them against the Cheese Library rather than re-reading summaries.
For administrative details — enrolment, course providers, exam format and fees — the Academy of Cheese website is the authoritative source; this article covers learning approach, not logistics. Before you finish the cycle, check yourself against the list below. Treat each item as a pass-or-redo milestone: anything you cannot do confidently sends you back to the matching week's exercise, not to more passive reading.
- You can write the five-link chain from memory for two cheeses in each of at least four families.
- You can place an unfamiliar cheese in a family from observation alone and name the cues that decided it.
- Your tasting notes use specific descriptors with no bare intensity adjectives left in them.
- You can state what mellowing changes — and what it leaves intact — for a cheese you know well.
- Your written chains match the Academy's Cheese Library entries for those cheeses.
- Self-check scores from these exercises are learning milestones only, not predictions of your result.
References and further reading
Use these references to explore the concepts and check the latest information from the relevant organizations.