While choosing strains to order from the vault I stumbled upon this strain I had never heard of before. I ordered it on a whim based only on the description of a "bigger mouthfeel than most strains." As I am a fan of "mouthfeel" in my beers, I am always looking for a way to achieve this. It's nice to have another variable to achieve this besides crystal malts or oats.
I made a bitter recipe recently and split the batch into 3 buckets; one with WLP022, one with WLP030, and one with WLP023 (this last one may have a brett infection so I won't speak to it). At bottling, I first tasted the WLP022 sample from the hydrometer. It was .002 lower in final gravity and had a dry mineral quality to it with very little body which made it seem watery. As soon as I tasted the WLP030 sample I noticed an immediate difference. It had a nice mouth-coating feel, not viscous, but very pleasant and "present" in the mouth. Comparing the bottled samples 3 weeks later this was still obvious, and the sweetness was much more pronounced. I would have thought this additional mouthfeel and sweetness would have suppressed the hops, but the opposite was the case. The hops had more clarity and the beer seemed bigger and generally more amplified in all flavor and feel aspects, as if adjusting the output of a stereo by raising all the levels on an equalizer. I look forward to trying this in many more recipes and highly recommend other give it a try.
Specialty strain from The Vault 
Ale 
