The ’89 UK Cheese has one of the cleaner origin stories in British cannabis history. Sometime in 1988 or 1989, someone grew out a packet of Sensi Seeds Skunk #1 in the Chiltern Hills and found a single female phenotype that didn’t smell like the rest. Where the other plants expressed the classic skunk funk, this one smelled like mature cheese — sharp, sour, pungent, and so distinct from everything around it that it was immediately cloned and passed along before anyone had decided what to do with it.
By around 1995 a clone had reached Exodus, an alternative community operating out of Haz Hall on the edges of Luton, Bedfordshire. Exodus organized free parties, grew cannabis communally, and circulated generously with the people who passed through their world. The Cheese clone spread through that network — handed off to visitors, traded between growers, moving outward from Luton through the British underground over the following years until it became the most recognizable and widely circulated clone-only cut in UK cannabis history. The sour, funky, almost lactobacillus quality of the smell was completely unlike anything else available at the time, and people who encountered it didn’t forget it.
Skunkbud #18 is a Pagoda Seeds numbered selection — one of the old-school skunk cuts that Pagoda, a breeder known for working heavily with classic skunk and cheese genetics, has preserved and worked with as a foundational breeding component. The #18 designation places it in a population that was run and evaluated carefully, with this specific selection chosen for the deep skunk backbone, vigorous growth, and heavy lateral branching that make it a reliable structural and terpene contributor in a cross.
Together they produce a cross that sits squarely in the British skunk-cheese tradition at its most concentrated. The ’89 Cheese contributes the sharp, sour, dairy-funk character that made the original Exodus cut famous; the Skunkbud #18 adds depth, structure, and the earthier, muskier skunk base that grounds the cheese note and keeps the whole profile from going one-dimensional. The result smells like old-school British cannabis in the most specific possible sense — not an approximation, not a modern hybrid with cheese in the name, but genetics that trace directly to the source.
In the garden plants grow with classic skunk structure — medium height, strong branching, vigorous and forgiving. The cheese funk arrives early in flower and keeps building. Resin production is solid throughout. Flowering runs approximately 63 days indoors. As a breeding component the cross contributes both the terpene character and the structural reliability that Pagoda built it to deliver.