guys - it still works fine - there's just a longer lag time than normal
(but I sent my two packs back
)
I've been waiting a few weeks to see if I can confirm the sentiment above.
I disagree.
My 5-gal porter is ruined. It has an overriding flavor that is hard to describe: something akin to old bananas with aromas of trash-can.
I've been brewing for 4 years. I'm careful and meticulous, and this is my first bad batch of anything.
Synopsis:
***
In August, I pitched a hydrated Notties onto a porter wort. At 48 hours, nothing was happening. So I hydrated another pack of Notties with precise temperature management and pitched that.
At 84 hours, nothing was happening, so I racked to a clean carboy (to leave the sediment behind) and pitched a hydrated packet of Coopers. Bang - it took off in 6 hours.
The beer spent 10 days total in primary, a week in the secondary, and a week in bottles.
It's not toxic or poisonous. It doesn't smell bad. It smells like beer. But it tastes really bad.
***
I googled "slow start with Nottinghams", and discovered the recall.
Both packets that I pitched were from the bad lot. I also had one more unopened packet from that lot.
According to what you read on this and other brew forums, some of that lot of Notties works fine, and some doesn't.
That seems curious to me. It's possible that some of the lot was killed somehow during transit, but honestly, dried yeast is pretty hard to kill. Another possibility is that Danstar's recent packaging change has been accompanied by some QC problems: perhaps more than one lot of yeast actually made it into the "bad lot", or the packaging job went bad, etc.
Lot's of folks are saying that this yeast "is okay, it just starts slow".
That's a nice spin, but probably untrue.
If a yeast takes 4 days to start, that's 4 days during which undesirable bugs have an opportunity to gain a foothold in the absence of competition. Not good. We rely on our yeast to launch quickly. A quick launch means billions of "good" organisms that interfere with the development of significant populations of undesirable organisms. That's a primary goal of yeast fermentation.
If a yeast takes 4 days to start, it's not brewers yeast. It's more likely a pack of dead brewer's yeast that also contains a tiny percentage of some other strain of yeast that is still viable. It starts really slow because it is few in number, and it makes rotten beer because it's not actually "Nottingham's yeast", rather, it's the ugly cousin "Rottingham's" that unavoidably accompanies Nottingham's as a tiny percentage of total volume. And it makes bad beer.
Anyway...
A week ago, I mailed my two empty packets and one full packet from the recalled batch to the Lallemand address in Canada. Mail from USA to Canada is SLOWWW.
Today, I emailed Keith Lemcke at Lallemand to tell him my porter is ruined and ask how his company might make it up to me for my lost time, effort, and ingredients.
I'm interested to see whom else here has had a beer ruined by this bad lot of yeast, and also how they've been treated by Lallemand-Danstar after the fact.
Lot's of folks are giving kudos to Lallemand for "standing behind their product." Maybe it's a bit soon for that just yet...
Let's see how they handle folks with ruined beers.
DCS