Wow...notty dominated my wort

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skyzo

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OK, so this was my first time brewing with nottingham. Ive always used S-05 as my clean ale yeast, but they had just got a new shipment of notty in, so I figured I would try it out. I threw it into a 1.054 american pale saturday evening after rehydrating. Before I went to bed I checked it, and about 6 hours after pitching, it already looked like a hurricane in there. yeast rafts were flying around at like 100mph and the shole thing was churning. The temp on my fermometer said 72, and ambient was only 62 or so, so it was producing some major heat!
This morning I went and looked at it, and the krausen has already fell back in after being a good 3 in high in the peak. I've yet to check it with a hydrometer, but that is insane if it already finished up most of the fermentation in 2.5 days. Is this normal? It fermented between 65-73 the whole time, and now since activity has gone down, its at about 63F.
Im still going to let it sit in the primary for 3 more weeks, but I thought it was crazy how fast this notty ate up my wort
 
You are likely to get a few clove/banana esters since it fermented so warm. They will fade with age though.

Nottingham is my favorite yeast. I recently made a barley wine with OG = 1.095 or so. I pitched a big nottinham slurry washed from a previous batch onto it, after 5 days I am at 1.020.............the fermenter never went above 67 degrees the entire time. Low and slow! I even mashed this at 154.

What you are experiencing is normal, and I bet you pitched the yeast a little warm...that is why you hit 73 degrees.
 
Does Notty have a tart aftertaste to you?

If you ferment cool over a long period of time I have found that I do get a slight tartness...I fermented a nut brown 60-64 degrees with it and I get a slight tart. I find the sweet spot to be 66-67 degrees for nottingham.

I would also think that I could have controled the tartness by ferementing cool for the first 4-6 days and then raising to around 68 for a week. It is just my gut feeling that this would take care of the tartness.
 
not surprised at all, Nottingham is a beast, my 2nd brew was a churning, frothing carboy of madness. And my recent Nut Brown fermented out in less than 2 days flat. Stuff is incredible. Plus its dirt cheap.
 
I have my first Notty batch brewing away right now. I tossed it into a fairly sessionable wheat beer after appropriately hydrating and got nothing for 12 hours. I was concerned because the yeast were a few months old and thought they might have been part of one of the bad batches, but after giving the fermenter some good shaking, fermentation took off like a rocket.
 
I don't understand why people call it a "clean" ale yeast. It's got a lot of English-y character, clean would never enter my mind.
 
I don't understand why people call it a "clean" ale yeast. It's got a lot of English-y character, clean would never enter my mind.

It is a very clean, malt forward yeast that really doesn't bring much to the party if fermented in the proper temp range. It let's hops and malt dominate and it just eats sugar.
 
It is a very clean, malt forward yeast that really doesn't bring much to the party if fermented in the proper temp range. It let's hops and malt dominate and it just eats sugar.

I disagree.

I've fermented six ways till Sunday. It has an ester aroma and flavor profile that is distinctly English. Maybe not S-04 estery, but certainly nowhere near as clean as the Chico yeast.
 
not surprised at all, Nottingham is a beast, my 2nd brew was a churning, frothing carboy of madness. And my recent Nut Brown fermented out in less than 2 days flat. Stuff is incredible. Plus its dirt cheap.

Yeah thats another reason I was willing to give it a chance, at $1 a pack, its hard to pass up.

The recipe I followed for this APA (blacklab's Orange APA) actually called for s-04, so if it does have some british characteristics im OK with that.
 
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