@DangerRoss..thanks! Not brewing, just browsing
@BeerGrylls...
Really? That is very interesting. I haven't really any insight on that, but I'd like to think I would be able to tell straight away if I tasted Heady and it was a different yeast.
It did seem to me that John was noticeably either annoyed, worried, or paranoid about the rapid spread of Conan throughout not only the homebrew scene, but also yeast companies and possibly commercial breweries. When I was running Yeast Geek, I had a few large breweries (and many smaller ones) contact me asking for large commercial pitches of the yeast.
For a while there, John was going out of his way to make Conan not seem very important, after basically spending the last few years saying it was the magic behind Heady Topper. Seemed a bit strange to me at his sudden change of tune just about when things were going strongest on the interest about the yeast.
I had conversations about the yeast in great detail before he upgraded his facilities, and not so much afterwards. Something IMHO was clearly going wrong with the yeast in the old setup and he was trying very hard to fix it but failing. Attenuation was becoming worse after each
new harvest , not just each generation. So the yeast was going from 88% attenuation in Gen 1A to 80% in Gen 18A, then 87% in Gen1B to 79% Gen1B and so forth. Eventually they had to cut off half the generations to keep the attenuation up above 80%. The cause of this? No idea. Where ever the yeast was being stored perhaps? Maybe it just went on too long? Mishandled at some point? Freezer problems? Too much glycerine? Could be anything.
If the problem wasn't fixed and they weren't able to top crop and get the best yeast and re-bank it, maybe they had to replace it with a new strain that was more controllable. Just my guess. Towards the end of the Spring 2013, the new yeast coming out was very unpredictable. Half would be solid, half would be cloves and low attenuation. I still think he was having troubles with it through April which was when I last had fresh yeast from him I think.