Okay. I'm a believer now. This is my documented experience with imperial yeast A38 juice strain. I have been using why yeast for years and decided to try something new. For a few dollars more I didn't have to make a starter. I have a lot going on this month but so that was going to be a plus. Unfortunately it arrived during the hottest week we've had this year. I live in Virginia and the weather was remarkably mild so I ordered it online with some other things because the local homebrew shop is a little out of my way in the town where I work. But I digress... We were away when it came to the house so it sat outside for at least 6 hours. That would come to find out later on then it arrived about 20 minutes after we left the house. Awesome. If I take it out of the bag it was swollen up like with a wyeast smack pack. That was a little bummed but put it in the refrigerator immediately. I was hoping it would just be swollen from the heat. It went down considerably over the next 24 hours. The slurry separated from the nutrient. It looked good but the only true test would be a starter first so I don't ruin a 5 gallon batch. Again, I bought this to avoid the starter! I threw it on the stir plate about 10:00 that night. I don't have Erlenmeyer flasks so I use 2000 ml mason jars then step up if need be for cell count. I only do a 1750 ml starter on mine. I like to leave significant head space in case there's a little bit of a blow over even with the stair plate I was warned about the high krausen. They were right. Amir 6 or 7 hours later the top of the only one foil was rattling like it was being hit by a fan of wind. You can see all kinds of activity. After 24 hours I popped it in the fridge for about 2 weeks. Quite the thick layer of slurry let me tell you. It never did settle out brite, but its not that flocculant. I pitched it on a New England on PA yesterday and had visible signs of fermentation within 3 hours. Yes that's right. Three hours. It looked like it had been shaken. It had what I call the egg drop soup effect where stuff is floating up and down and the reproductive phase has kicked in. You know what I'm talking about. The beer ****. The money shot. Floored me. I already had the blowoff tube on standby. Within 8 hours, there was already a 3/4-in layer of crows and CO2 bubbles on top of the beer. I opened up the fermentation chamber and hooked up the blow off tube before I went to bed last night. This morning when I woke up. It had already shot through the blowoff. WOW The only time I've ever had something like this is when I did an Irish red a few years ago and caught me off guard. I'm actually going to move up my bio transformation hop buy one day on this. It already smells so good with the samba and Galaxy and azacca in there. This already makes me never want to use London 3 again. I don't brew these brews that often because they are expensive. I usually only do one a year. But with the veterans blend that's coming out this year I might do another one or use that hop blend to make a white IPA for the winter. Thanks beer advocate for letting me know about the Gary sinise foundation. And thank you to everyone on here that's ever helped me in the past few years. Vikeman and others have stewarded many noobs into the realm of semi-professionals. Together, we make better beer. Alone, we make empty bottles.
And sorry for the typos above. I think everyone knows what I mean. And went back and looked at it and Google just doesn't do a great job at translating as they like to think. Has anyone else had this strain take off this fast?
Imperial yeast is my main go to liquid yeast nowadays. I had to use a 7 month old pack of Dryhop and that took off in less than 24 hours, much to my surprise. With no starter either! It made a great neipa!
