Second in Before They Had Names — the series where we take the old words growers used for smell, one at a time, and go all the way down.
One plant fed an entire country
Last time we did skunk, and the punchline was that the most famous smell in cannabis isn't a terpene at all. Today we're staying in the exact same family — same gene pool, Skunk #1 — but following one single plant that went somewhere completely different.
Cheese.
And here's the hook. No seed bank made Cheese. There was no catalogue, no breeder's release, no packet on a shelf anywhere. One freak plant, found once, kept alive as a cutting, and hand-carried across an entire country by people who weren't selling it.
That's not a strain. That's a relay race.
The one plant
Late eighties — around 1988, '89 — southern England. The version most often told puts it out around the Chiltern Hills. A grower pops a packet of Skunk #1, and the reporting points to a Sensi Seeds pack. Completely ordinary thing to be doing at the time.
And one female comes out wrong. Not bad-wrong. Different-wrong. Sharp, tangy, savoury — like aged cheddar left out on the bench overnight. Nothing else in the room smelled like that. As it turned out, nothing else in the country did either.
Every grower reading this knows that moment. You run a pack, you've got ten plants that all look like cousins, and then there's one that stops you dead when you brush past it. It's a lottery ticket.
Normally that's where the story ends. You smoke her, you tell your mates about her, she's gone. What makes Cheese different is what happened next — somebody decided she was worth keeping, and took a cutting.
Worth being straight on one thing: who that original grower was is genuinely disputed. There are claims and counter-claims and nobody can prove it. I'm not naming anyone. And honestly, the missing name is part of the story — the plant outlived the credit.
Genetically, don't let the smell fool you. Cheese is a phenotype of Skunk #1, not a new hybrid. Same grandparents as last episode's skunk — Afghani over Acapulco Gold and Colombian Gold. She's just the odd one out at the family barbecue.
And this is where the whole thing hinges. Cheese became clone-only. She never went out as seed in her original form. Cross her and you don't get her — you get her kids. The only way on earth to keep her is to keep cutting her. Year after year. Room after room. Hands to hands.
How one clone fed a nation
The cut circulates underground for a few years, the way cuts always have. Then somewhere around the mid-nineties it reaches the Exodus Collective — a free-party and activist crew based in Luton, about thirty miles north of London.
Picture the scene properly. This is the UK free-party and acid house era. Warehouses, fields, sound systems, a huge loose network of trusted people criss-crossing the country every weekend. Which is, if you think about it, a perfect distribution network.
Exodus propagated the cut and handed it out to growers all over the country. No shop. No catalogue. No price on the genetics. A subculture moved it, and that's where the name comes from — Exodus Cheese.
Here's the bit that gets me. In 1994 the UK passed the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act — the one that infamously tried to define rave music in law as music with "a succession of repetitive beats." Crews like Exodus were squarely in the firing line. So you've got a scene the government is actively trying to shut down, and that same scene is quietly keeping the most important cut in the country alive.
You couldn't write it.
And it spread because it earned it. Heavy yields, short flowering, handled cool damp British conditions, and it loved a small indoor room — a loft, a cupboard, a spare room under an HID. The perfect plant for prohibition-era UK growing.
The irony is the same one from the skunk episode. The thing that made Cheese famous is the thing that got people caught. You could pick a Cheese grow from the footpath. They grew it anyway. That's devotion.
Why it smells like actual cheese
Right — the chemistry, and this is my favourite fact of the lot.
The cheese note isn't a terpene. The terpenes in Cheese — myrcene, caryophyllene, limonene — give you the earthy, skunky, slightly sweet base. Background music again. None of them are the cheese.
The dairy tang has been linked to a group of compounds called short-chain fatty acids. The two that keep turning up in the aroma research are octanoic acid and decanoic acid. And here's the kicker — that's the same class of compound that gives aged cheese its smell. Real cheddar. Blue cheese. Goat's cheese.
It's not a poetic description. It's the same chemical neighbourhood.
You'll also see isovaleric acid mentioned, which is the compound behind the tang of old cheese and, famously, sweaty feet. So when your mate said it smelled like socks, he wasn't bagging it. He was doing chemistry.
And some trivia I love: octanoic acid's old name is caprylic acid, decanoic is capric. Both named after the Latin for goat, because they smell like goats, and they turn up in goat's milk and goat's cheese. So every old boy who ever said a jar smelled like a billy goat was closer to the textbook than he knew.
Careful wording, because we promised to keep this honest: the research says these acids are implicated in cheese-like cannabis aromas. There's no single "Cheese molecule". The full smell is a blend — terpenes, a bit of sulphur, these fatty acids, layered.
Are fatty acids on a terpene certificate? Nope. So that's two for two. Skunk: sulphur compounds, not on the panel. Cheese: fatty acids, not on the panel. Two of the most famous smells in the plant's history, and the certificate can't explain either of them — while blokes in lofts across England could pick it blindfolded from the other end of the house.
What this means for your grow
This is the hard part, and it's the bit I actually care about most.
A clone-only line is one bad year from gone.
A seed line sits in a fridge for years and still pops. It has a backup built in. A clone only exists as a living plant, in somebody's room, right now. Power goes out for a week. A pest wipes out the mother. Someone gets raided, moves house, or just gives up growing. And a genetic that's been kept alive for thirty-five years is simply gone. Forever.
The frightening part is there's no alarm. One year a hundred people hold a cut. Then twenty. Then two. Then none.
And there's a newer threat stacked on top of all the old ones — hop latent viroid. It's torn through clone collections overseas. It moves through cuttings and dirty tools, a plant can carry it looking perfectly healthy, and it can turn a legendary cut into a dud: smaller, weaker, less resin. For a clone-only line, that's an extinction event, because you can't breed your way out of it. There's only the one plant.
So, practically:
- Clean your blades between plants. Every time. It's thirty seconds.
- Don't take cuttings from a mother you're not sure about.
- If you're serious about holding something, look into testing, or tissue culture as a backup. That's where the serious clone libraries are heading.
- Work on a rule of three — three copies, three places, three people. Sounds like overkill right up until the day it isn't.
- Keep your mothers young. Take cuts from healthy vigorous growth and refresh the mother from her own cutting every so often. A tired mother gives you tired cuts.
And this is also why "is my Cheese the real Cheese?" is a fair question, not a snobby one. Thirty-odd years of cutting, relabelling and honest mistakes. A lot of what's sold as Cheese isn't the Exodus cut. The people who've run the real one describe it pretty consistently — vigorous, a bit vine-like and stretchy, spear-shaped colas, eight to nine weeks, and a stink that's properly savoury rather than sweet. If yours is short, dense and fruity, it's probably a relative. Which isn't a criticism. Just call it what it is.
Seed versions like Big Buddha Cheese — the cut crossed to an Afghani male to make something seed-stable — are legitimate and valuable. But be honest about what they are. That's her children and grandchildren. It isn't her.
That's the breeder's dilemma in one line. You can carry her traits into seed by crossing and re-selecting. But you're preserving her lineage, not her. Grief and craft in the same decision — you keep the family going because you know you can't keep the person.
So if you're holding something special right now, don't hold it alone. Keep a backup. Give a cut to someone you trust. Two rooms are a hell of a lot safer than one.
That's the Exodus lesson, really. The only reason Cheese survived is that it was shared. If it had stayed in that one loft in 1988, none of us would have ever heard of it.
— WildRoo
Listen to the episode — Before They Had Names, Episode 2: Cheese
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