Two Yeasts, one beer?

If I did not have time to do a starter and pitched a vial of White Labs and half a packet of Notty, will they fight and kill each other?

Anyone done "yeast blending" before?

Not familiar with Notty, but they won't kill each other.

No, you are inventing something new here. Just kidding .

Papazian recommended to play with that in The Complete Joy and there were an article on that in BYO (December 2009). You'll have some characters of each yeast.

Competition amongst the different types of yeast will eventually be the death of one of them.

Perhaps when you make a low gravity starter and aerate well you might see a new genus of yeast form and come out on top. Inbred yeast types are generally weaker than "mutts". You may compare this to dogs, a thoroughbred lives shorter than a mutt. If this gives better beer is both unlikely and debatable in general though.

If you keep harvesting and reusing the yeast, eventually one strain will crowd out the other. But we're talking at least 5 batches for that to happen. In your first batch, you'll just have a blend of beers that is X% WL and (100-X)% Notty. It might be serendiptously tasty.

I just made a beer that I normally use one strain of yeast (I'd have to check my notes to see which one). But, the local homebrew shop owner had mentioned I might want to try to pitch a second yeast (he's regular contributor to one of the brew magazines, he forgot more than I'll probably know!).

So, I gave it a shot and sampled it and was wicked impressed!!! Great flavors are present.

Not ready to drink yet, but the sampling really made me happy!!!

If not for anything, I'm starting to make take a gallon from batches here and there and play with mixing a few yeast strains.

That's about as mad scientist as I care to get.....

Jonathan