Random, but I've tried brewing Young's Special Bitter with both WLP033 and WY1768 (multiple times), both of which are supposedly the Young's strain, and have not been crazy happy with any of them. Much too clean, no real top cropping ability, and lacks the characteristic ethyl heptanoate note of the real stuff. Fast forward, kegged a bitter made with WLP030 this week and first taste was "holy **** this tastes like Young's!"
The mouthfeel of WLP030 is also terrific, will be interesting to see how it ages, but I definitely plan to use it to brew some Youngs clones.
WLP030 has come across very clean for me and cant seem to get consistent attenuations. Attenuation also in the low to mid 60s not the mid 70s like the webpage suggests, but I did get a 69% attenuation once. What kind of attenuation did you get?
Had to look up ethyl heptanoate, I occasionally get a subtle grape like flavor from my pale lagers and figured it was esters until I seen some people saying it can comes from acid malt. I only use acid malt in my pale lagers so the last one I used lactic acid in the mash instead to see if that was the cause of the grape flavor.