Ok i've got a kolsch in the primary which we brewed last sat. I was a little rushed so I only got to make a 500ml starter just to kinda get the yeast up and working. Well I smacked the pack which I do to make sure I have viable yeasties and one pack took off and other was lagging never really expanded much. The lagging pack I discovered after the fact had a date of aug 8 on it.
I went ahead and used it in a 500ml starter and it was showing signs of life but nothing like the other pack.
Anyway divided my 10 gal batch in to two carboys and pitched the yeast. As expected the yeast that took off did so in the first carboy and the lagging flask took about 4 hours more to start. they are fermenting in my freezer with and ambient temp of 58.
fast forward to today I decide to take a gravity and see how things are going. Slow yeast carboy krausen has totally fallen and it has attenuated to 1.008 about what I wanted. the yeast that took off carboy still has a thick krausen and gravity on it is 1.010.
This doesn't make sense to me as I would think the yeast that was showing signs of slow activity would take longer to finish than the one that was going gangbusters at pitching and 8 hours into the ferment.
The only variable I can think of would be O2 I left the O2 in a little long on the fast starting carboy.
I'm not freakin out just interesting to see this yeast act differently with most every other variable being the same.
Dave