There is a block of cheese that has caused a tunnel fire, sparked a national debate about identity, and divided international visitors into two firm camps: those who taste it once and can never quite forget it, and those who reach for it every single morning without thinking. The cheese is brunost — Norway’s beloved brown cheese — and it is one of the most distinctive, most misunderstood, and most deeply Norwegian things you will ever encounter.
If you have spent time in Norway, you have almost certainly seen it: a flat, caramel-coloured block sitting on the breakfast table, next to the crispbread and the waffle iron. If you have not been to Norway, you may have encountered it at a Scandinavian food shop, or spotted it in a supermarket fridge labelled Ski Queen. Either way, the question is always the same: what exactly is this thing?
What Is Brunost?
The word brunost (pronounced roughly bru-nost) translates directly as “brown cheese” in Norwegian. But the name is, technically, a slight misnomer. Brunost is not really a cheese in the conventional sense. It is a whey cheese — a product made not from milk curds, as most cheeses are, but from the liquid whey left behind after curds have been separated out.
To make brunost, fresh whey — often blended with whole milk and cream — is boiled slowly in open vats for several hours. As the liquid reduces, the water evaporates and the naturally occurring milk sugars undergo a process called the Maillard reaction, caramelising as they concentrate. The result is a thick, dark, intensely flavoured paste that is poured into rectangular moulds and left to cool into a firm, sliceable block. The characteristic brown colour and the distinctive sweet, fudgy flavour both come entirely from this caramelisation — no flavouring, no colouring, nothing added.
The taste is genuinely unlike anything else: sweet and savoury at once, with notes of caramel, goat’s milk, and a slight tang. It is often compared, in its divisive quality, to Vegemite or Marmite — something that polarises newcomers but that those raised on it find completely indispensable.
The History of Brunost
The precise origins of whey-based cheese in Scandinavia are ancient — archaeological evidence suggests similar products were being made as far back as 650 BC. But the brunost we know today is conventionally traced to a single person and a single moment of improvisation in the mountains of Norway.
In 1863, a young farmer named Anne Hov was working at a mountain dairy (a seter) in the Gudbrandsdalen valley, in central Norway. At the time, the local farming economy was struggling, and dairy profits were thin. In an attempt to enrich the whey cheese she was already making, Anne experimented with adding fresh cream to the boiling whey — an addition that had not been tried before. The result was a richer, smoother, more intensely flavoured product. Her employer, a man named Osten Tostensen Hov, began selling it to travellers along the valley road, and demand grew quickly.
Within a generation, brunost had become a symbol of Norwegian mountain farming culture. By the turn of the twentieth century, it had spread across the country. Today it is produced at scale by Norway’s national dairy cooperative, TINE — the dominant force in Norwegian dairy — though artisan producers across the country still make their own regional varieties.
Norway is one of very few countries in the world with a truly native whey cheese tradition at national scale. In that sense, brunost is not just a food product: it is a marker of a particular relationship between Norwegians and their landscape, their farming heritage, and the Nordic ethic of wasting nothing and making the most of what you have.
The Main Varieties
Walk into a Norwegian supermarket and you will find not one but several varieties of brunost, each with its own character.
Gudbrandsdalsost
This is the brunost most people outside Norway will recognise, sold internationally as Ski Queen by TINE. It is made from a blend of goat’s milk and cow’s milk whey, with added cream, and strikes a balance between the sweetness of the caramelised sugars and the tanginess of the goat’s milk. The flavour is mellow enough to convert first-timers, but distinctive enough to be unmistakably Norwegian. Gudbrandsdalsost is named after the Gudbrandsdalen valley where Anne Hov made her breakthrough.
Geitost / Ekte Geitost
Geitost means “goat cheese,” and ekte geitost means “real goat cheese.” This variety is made exclusively from goat’s milk whey, which gives it a more pronounced, sharper flavour than Gudbrandsdalsost. The colour is often slightly darker, and the taste is more intense. It is an acquired taste even by Norwegian standards — but its fans are devoted.
Fløtemysost
Made from cow’s milk whey only (no goat’s milk), fløtemysost is the mildest of the main varieties. The flavour is creamier and sweeter, with less of the distinctive tang, making it a gentler introduction for newcomers. The colour tends to be a lighter, more golden caramel.
Prim
A softer, spreadable version of brunost, prim (also called rømmekolle in some regions) is made at an earlier stage of the cooking process before the mixture sets fully. It is closer in texture to a thick caramel spread and is particularly popular as a topping for freshly baked bread or traditional Norwegian flatbreads.
How to Eat Brunost
Brunost has its own tool. The ostehøvel — the Norwegian cheese slicer — was invented in 1925 by a carpenter named Thor Bjørklund specifically to cut thin, even slices from a block of brunost. The slicer is now a staple of Nordic kitchens, and its invention is a small but telling detail: when a country invents a dedicated tool for a food, that food has become truly essential.
The classic way to eat brunost is simple: a thin slice laid on a piece of knekkebrød (crispbread) or rye bread, often with a thin scrape of butter underneath. Breakfast in Norway is frequently built around exactly this — a slice or two of brunost, some bread, a boiled egg, perhaps a little jam. It is unfussy, filling, and deeply satisfying.
But brunost’s most celebrated pairing is with Norwegian waffles. Heart-shaped Norwegian vafler, warm from the iron, with a slice of brunost on top — ideally alongside a spoonful of sour cream and some berry jam — is a combination that Norwegians will defend to the last. The contrast of warm, soft waffle against cool, dense cheese, sweet against slightly sharp, is one of those combinations that only makes sense once you have tried it.
Beyond breakfast and waffles, brunost also appears in cooking. It is used as an ingredient in Norwegian sauces — particularly the rich, sweet brown sauce served with game dishes — and melted into gravies to give them a distinctive caramel depth. Some Norwegian cooks add a small cube to venison stews or wild game braises, where its sweetness balances the richness of the meat.
It also turns up in more unexpected places. Norwegian mountain hikers carry it in their packs — it is calorie-dense, needs no refrigeration in cold weather, and can be eaten directly from the block with no preparation. Hikers exploring friluftsliv traditions in the Norwegian mountains will often find brunost appearing as the obvious energy food of choice alongside a thermos of coffee.
The Tunnel Fire That Went Around the World
In January 2013, a lorry carrying 27 tonnes of brunost caught fire inside the Brattli tunnel in northern Norway. Firefighters arrived quickly — but found they were largely unable to extinguish the blaze. The concentrated fat and sugar content of brunost, once ignited, burns with extraordinary persistence and at very high temperatures. The tunnel burned for five days. It was closed for several weeks for repairs.
The story made international headlines, partly because of its absurdity and partly because it neatly encapsulated something true about brunost: it is a food of surprising intensity. The same qualities that make it caramelise beautifully and keep it shelf-stable make it, apparently, extremely difficult to put out once lit.
Norwegians treated the whole episode with characteristic dryness.
Brunost Beyond Norway
Brunost has been exported from Norway for decades under the Ski Queen brand, and is widely available in Scandinavian food shops, specialist delis, and increasingly in mainstream supermarkets across the UK, US, and Australia. Its international profile has grown in recent years, in part because of growing appetite for Scandinavian food culture — the same wave of interest that has brought Icelandic skyr, Nordic gravlax, and Danish smørrebrød to wider attention.
In South Korea, brunost became a minor social media sensation after a Norwegian exchange student shared a video of eating it as a pizza topping. The clip went viral. TINE reported a surge in export inquiries. Whether brunost pizza will become a lasting international trend remains to be seen, but as a story it tells you something about how Norwegian food culture travels: slowly, then all at once.
Is Brunost Actually Good?
This is the question most visitors to Norway eventually have to face, usually at a breakfast buffet, holding a thin slice of something that looks like fudge and smells faintly of goat.
The honest answer is: it depends on how you approach it. Eaten in thick slabs on its own, brunost can overwhelm. Eaten in thin slices — as the cheese slicer demands — on buttered crispbread or a warm waffle, it makes immediate sense. The key is restraint, which feels appropriate for a food that emerged from a culture that values exactly that.
It is worth noting that Norwegians do not eat brunost because they have no choice. Norway has excellent food culture, a thriving artisan dairy scene, and access to some of the finest fish, lamb, and game in the world. Brunost persists not out of habit or necessity, but because Norwegians genuinely love it — and because it is, in its modest, caramel-brown way, a small daily connection to something that feels distinctly and irreducibly Norwegian.
A Cheese That Is More Than a Cheese
In a country where friluftsliv — the love of outdoor life — shapes everything from city planning to school timetables, it feels fitting that the national cheese is one you can eat on a mountain with a penknife and a piece of flatbread, no plate required.
Brunost is not trying to be sophisticated. It is not a cheese for cheese boards and wine pairings. It is a cheese for long winters, early mornings, hiking lunches, and the kind of uncomplicated pleasure that Scandinavian culture tends to protect more carefully than most. It is, in that sense, not just a food — it is an expression of values: practicality, connection to the land, and the distinctly Nordic conviction that simple things, done well, are more than enough.
If you have the chance to try it — especially in Norway, on a warm waffle, on a cold morning — take it.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
