Pics of SNPA bottle dregs vs smack pack ferm

[MattyIce]

For those interested, I am brewing a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone. I decided to split the five gallon batch into two and then pitch a different yeast into each. I pitched a fresh 1056 smack pack into one. I spent a little over a week prior stepping up two bottles' worth of dregs to a 1L starter. This was crashed, decanted and pitched into the other fermentor.

Fermentation started off at roughly the same time for both fermentors, and 10 days in, the SNPA still has little yeast rafts. The 1056 is clear. Not sure what this means, but it is neat to see.

SNPA

1056:

 

[AK7007]

Necroing. Do you still have tasting notes? Would be interesting to know how far the Ballantine strain has diverged taste wise. (Though it's really hard to know pitch rates without a hemocytometer, and you will get effects from that)

 

[MattyIce]

Funny you ask, I tasted the first two bottles yesterday. For one, they both turned out great!

They are very similar in every way. I do feel like the hop bitterness came through more on the dregs batch...just a little more bite with each sip. If I were to brew this again, I think I would go through the effort of propagating from bottle dregs again. Might be worthwhile on my next IPA as well.