Ancient thread, but for anyone else who's following in my footsteps on warm-fermenting S-23:
I've made tropical stout recipes with S-23 twice now. The first time was all S-23; I split the batch in 3, 1 fermenting on my kitchen counter in Sacramento in March (so...72-75ish ambient), one fermenting in a fridge at...like...65ish....and one fermenting in a fridge at 50something. None of them were bad, but I liked both the counter and lager temp ones better than the ale temp one, and I think the counter might have narrowly edged out the lager temp one. Both were mildly fruity, with slightly different profiles, and had a decent accentuation of malt character, the ale one was kind of stilted.
I just split a second batch into four, with S-23, Nottingham (...yeah, I knew that was a bad idea from the start, but I had 6 gallons of wort and 2-gallon bucket fermenters), US-05, and W-34/70, counter fermented again in March, and...bottled it, Sharpie-ing the caps to note which batch each was from, then had to prepare for a trip before I could label the bottles, put one of each in the fridge before I got home, labeled the bottle batch generally earlier this evening, finally, then decided to pour myself a sample from each...carelessly tossing the caps aside, having forgotten the bottles didn't have new labels on them. So there's a small chance I'm mistaken about which is which. But...
I liked the one I"m like 98% sure is US-05 (it interacts with dark grains...distinctively). I did not get the tropical-peachy flavor I usually get counter-fermenting it, which is interesting.
The I-think-was-Nottingham one was not the kind of bad I expected (prominent ethyl acetate on top of crispness, but not the "Dry hopped with a burning tire" flavor you get warm-fermenting S-04, yay small mercies).
I was quite shocked that the one I'm pretty sure was W-34, which I kind of expected to be the best of the bunch for a tropical stout, given the "warm-fermented [oh, probably means "ale-fermented" >.>] lager yeast" roots, was almost as bad as the Nottingham one in the same broad ways. o.o
Honestly, I liked the one I think is S-23 best. o.o
If I turn out to be right about that...oh, and it has very good attenuation and flocculation characteristics...I may just have to try it in a porter, a blonde "ale", and a brown IP"A" next.
If I've found a house yeast, I'm going to laugh and laugh and laugh. o.o