After 4.1 upgrade: the_excerpt() drops new line to paragraph

After updating my website tonight, the excerpts I display no longer include paragraphs where new lines are contained in the content. Is this a known issue? I read through the change notes for 4.1 and found no mention of this or any changes to how the wpautop filter should work. My excerpts are manual and until my upgrade neatly showed blank lines in the final display when I included blank lines in the manual excerpt section.

You can see the issue on the homepage of https://www.booksforears.com — beneath each book cover, the ‘short review’ should be separated from the prior text by a blank line.

Thoughts? Ideas?

I know I can go through and add html to the content to fix this – but I don’t want to do that if at all possible.

Thank you!
Jeanne