Be careful with statements like that. Yes, White Labs are now calling WLP051
S. pastorianus, which implies they've looked at its DNA and it's a lager-type hybrid. But there seems to be some doubt whether 1272 is similar to 051, so you can't say with confidence that 1272 is a lager strain.
But personally, I'd want a much more characterful yeast for a stout, something British (if in doubt, use ingredients native to the beer style's own country). WLP540 is an obvious choice, despite being labelled Belgian it's a British yeast that's adapted to strong dark beers - allegedly it came to Rochefort via the Palm yeastbank.
Kristen England seems to use either Wyeast 1469, 1099 or Nottingham in his clones.
While I understand the logic, you can end up playing Chinese whispers with people who just don't know much about the style -for instance Charlie Papazian used to view imperial stouts as barleywines and not stouts! For anything with British origins, you're better off poking around
Ron Pattinson's blog (and buying his books) - and this is one of those styles that is effectively defined by a single beer, Courage (formerly Barclay Perkins, formerly Thrale) Russian Imperial Stout. That's not to say you have to be a slave to history, but understanding the history is often the best way to get into a beer.
The history of stout was that it was originally the stronger beer from a partigyle that mostly produced porter, hence "stout porter". Porter emerged around 1720, and for most of the 18th century was just made with diastatic brown malt. The taxes needed to pay for the Napoleonic wars made brewers pay more attention to the poor efficiency of brown malt, and they rapidly switched to grists that were more pale malt than brown. The invention of black malt allowed them to bump up the amount of pale malt, to something like 70-80% pale, 20-30% brown, 3% black. A few brewers replaced 10% of the pale malt with amber. After Britain's equivalent of the Reinheitsgebot was repealed in 1880, you see mebbe 10% darkish invert sugar. Then the pressures of the early 20th century see some or all of the pale malt being replaced by cheaper base malts - at first SA malt, then even cheaper mild malt. The fact that these beers were almost invariably partigyled means that the recipe was often driven by the "other" beers - for instance you get <3% oats appearing so that they could legally sell some of the second runnings as an oatmeal stout.
This is a useful summary of where stouts were on the eve of WWI, before everything went to pot - you'll see there's not one ingredient common to all of the ones listed. You can see many of the effects I have mentioned in the
1921 version of Barclay Perkins - a long way from its origins.
Further tweaks come from people trying to approximate historic ingredients. For instance UK pale malt in the 19th century was almost all made from the Chevallier variety, which rapidly disappeared when better-yielding varieties emerged before WWI but which has now been revived on a small scale so you can buy it (at a price). But a reasonable approximation can be had by mixing Maris Otter with a bit of crystal (like 30:1 or something). Same with old-school brown malt, 4:1 modern brown malt : aromatic or Special B.
But inherently these are pretty simple beers - I've drunk a 19th century recipe that was just 3:1 pale:brown with 3% black and it was delicious. People generally overcomplicate these things, but it's worth going back to the origins to see how good the simple recipes can be. Here's the
1914 Courage Imperial (not the Russian) which is just pale, brown and black and which Kristen England calls "the best Russian stout ever made".
You can never have too much EKG in your life.
FWIW, this is the hopping used in the
Barclay Perkins version of 1928, which had a 2.5 hour boil :
FWH - 81lb Tutshams (Goldings-ish)
120min - 40.5lb Mid Kent (so probably Fuggles)
60min - 40.5lb Mid Kent
30min - 87lb Goldings
5min - 87lb Goldings
They were hopping at around 7lb/bbl at this time, which would imply this 336lb of hops was for 48bbl. If my sums are right, that works out as 19g/l, or 12.75 oz/5 US gallons. This was a hoppy beer.
