I tried two new donors over the past three months--one male, one female, both teenagers, from the same provider. And both had quite smelly stool. I will report in full about them soon, once I know better how I did with the better of these two long-term.
The female donor's stool also worse of some kind of rotten cabbage/barnyard as soon as I opened one of the capsules (I was trying to prepare it for lower delivery to test the influence of delivery method). And she is the only donor of the four I've tried who actually made me significantly WORSE, starting abruptly after just the first two capsules.
The male donor's stool I first tried as capsules but later tried as an enema, and his stool was a BIT less stinky but still worse than mine (and I mean how it smells on toilet paper), and in a different way--his enema had a somewhat "vomit-like" odor. And he is definitely the most helpful donor of the three I've tried at home, though still not nearly as immediately effective as the endoscopy FMT I had in the hospital (about whose stool I have no idea of the degree of odor). That FMT didn't make my OWN stool smell any worse, but I've not noticed that much correlation between a donor's stool odor and the odor of my own stool after.
The female donor's stool made my own stool smell vaguely sweet, almost like fermenting grape juice, but at the same time also produced a "newsprint-like" odor, whereas the male donor's stool just made my own stool smell closer to normal.
What I DID notice is the effect of continued frozen storage. This provider is very meticulous about keeping all FMTs at dry ice temperature from collection to delivery, and tells recipients to keep it on dry ice and never store it in a regular home freezer. Directly thawed from dry ice, the FMTs reeked the way I described above--however I did eventually put some in the regular freezer, and after thawing from there, the odor was substantially reduced. In particular, the female donor's stool after regular freezer storage got much closer to UT-AW-1998's stool, which is what I could only describe as mild but slightly "dog-poo-like", but also that "newsprint" quality became quite prominent, which I hadn't noticed in her stool thawed fresh from dry ice at all. And the male donor's stool just became more neutral.
While the female donor's stool didn't change from harmful to helpful when kept for a few days at regular freezer temperature, the male donor's capsules became noticeably more effective (I don't know about the enema, as this was a one-time thing and was done directly off of dry ice).
I remember reading many years ago about a stool bank and their preparation in some news article, and they mentioned that when it was put in a blender and the bacteria separated from the waste products, the resulting bacterial solution has very little odor. The fact that I did so much better with the hospital FMT from a stool bank makes me think that this may also significantly increase the effectiveness. Clearly neither Human Microbes nor this other newest provider separate their stool like this--their products are still as brown as fresh stool, whereas if you look at pictures of the bottles of material that stool banks ship, they are only a very light brown to straw color.
