The thought was to share information that I found extremely vexing, which I got from a Siebel certed commercial brewer.
The decision to withhold a name has to do with professional courtesy... I believe it would be inappropriate to put a brewer's name out there who could be giving information relevant to cloning a popular, but hard to get, commercial beer. That'd have to be his place, not mine.
I wasn't trying to convince anyone to do anything in particular. I got what I considered to be a shocking bit of info, and passed it along. This was all in the process of trying to start my own Conan starter, to do exactly the same stuff you guys are doing. I don't WANT there to be any truth to it... I want it to be a contaminated sample, because it'd otherwise be a real wrench in the gears for at least the equipment I have to manage ferm temps.
Clearly sharing what I was told falls short of having had an exhaustive Q and A with the guy. As mentioned, I told him we needed to try it again and see if we got the same results. I didn't ask him how he found out it was lager yeast, but LHBS said that a lager yeast colony would often look different than an ale yeast colony, in that ale yeast will tend to bunch more, like a pile of goo, and lager yeast will tend to have a little more of a chaotic pattern on a dish. I don't have the space for temp control equipment, so I've not made a lager, and therefore, never worked with lager yeast. I'm going by what I'm told. Is this incorrect? Would there be no visual cues toward whether a colony is ale or lager?
This shouldn't be something to get wild over anyways, if folks are cloning HT and the Conan starters are giving the right results. But I rather like to know the details of the ingredients I'm working with.