Low Oxygen Brewing

Ah, gotcha! Still haven’t tried no sparge.

 

You did read the part of: "When I was at Doemens I asked one of the teachers about HSA and specifically about how it impacts Pilseners." right?

Cheers!

 

Was this study published somewhere?

 

My take on it is that it is really important for Munich Helles. A little less for Pilsners, but I still can tell the difference in the beers I am brewing.

Dunkel, maybe not so much. One old school brewer in the middle of nowhere in Germany that makes mainly Dunkel said that you should avoid O2 as you can on your system, fill from the bottom in the mash and boil kettle, and so on. He did say some places have a house character from HSA.

Some of the well known breweries avoid O2 throughout the process.

 

I will be curious how my most recent LODO beer turns out (Munich Helles). I’ve done a few Pilsner, Kolsch, Dunkel, Hefe, Pales/IPA, Rauchbier and Stout with LODO… Just over a dozen batches I think at this point. Will be my first Helles and probably the iconic style that would benefit from LODO.

While the extra care in oxygen uptake is never a bad thing, can’t say I honestly notice much different in the end product. I do like the fact I can naturally carbonate and save time that way and eliminating the O2 in the keg, but at the end of the day, I don’t honestly notice anything really different from what I was doing before. I really try to notice something to justify the extra processes (pre-boil mash/sparge, SMB dosing, mash caps, underletting, spunding, dry hop in the keg during spunding, etc…), but I really can’t. I think my light lagers are just as good as they were before when I wasn’t as careful with mash/sparge water splashing, not preboiling and using SMB to reduce oxygen in my water, doing double or triple decoctions, cold crashing before racking to a keg and all that fun stuff. Even my NE-IPA’s that I dry hopped after the beer hit FG, cold crashed and then moved to a keg to force carb didn’t change in color/aroma/flavor or anything like that in the two months or so it’s on tap… Sometimes, even tasting even better near the very end than tapped super fresh. I’m on my third or fourth LODO IPA/Pale and the quality to me is equal. These LODO IPA"s were dry hopped during active ferm and then keg hopped only with extract remaining to any oxygen can be scrubbed. Plus all the other techniques of course.

Not saying one is better than the other and some people may see huge differences… But for me, I just don’t taste the difference at the end of the day in my glass. It’s usually always a really awesome, clean, well-made beer regardless.

Not giving up the LODO stuff yet as I absolutely think a sound process is extremely important and oxygen is never your friend, but I just don’t think it makes a drastic difference in my experience at least…I would at least keep a few techniques from it all, for sure, but eliminate some such as preboiling and rapidly chilling and SMB dosing the mash/sparge water for example to save some time... None of the techniques are a big deal or take much time (aside from preboiling and cooling for me, somewhat of a hassle), but all the other stuff is easy enough.

Of course, if you had terrible technique and switched to LODO which caused you to be far more careful and focused on your techniques, you would see big differences. Diminishing returns depending on your existing skill and techniques, IMO.

 

Again, I really think it comes down to how sound your technique was before doing the LODO stuff. I’d compare it to say, a diet. If you eat whatever you want (soda, burgers, fries, pizza, etc…) and start almost any diet and stick to it, you will see results.

If you already ate healthy (salads, veggies, fruit) and decided to go on a diet, you may not see much result. Doesn’t mean the diet doesn’t work, it's just that you already ate healthy so you won't see much benefit.

This is why I think for some, they see huge differences in LODO brewing. Again, any of the claims are subjective. Some say they taste a world of a difference and then people like myself, notice almost no difference. People just have to try it and make up their own conclusion… It’s the only way!

 

Have you done control experiments to confirm? I'm kind of with you. I've adopted some LODO techniques which as been great mainly from a "I'm focusing more on my process and technique" standpoint. But I'm not sure I'm seeing that big of a change. But I'm also trying to figure out if I'm just biased in my prior brewing results.

 

No control experiments... I don’t even think it is possible to even do one. If you think about that, it would be brewing an identical recipe side by side with no factors different. Strike temps, cooling rates, pitch rates, ferm temps and everything else would have to be completely identical for an accurate side-by-side, with LODO techniques thrown in on the one. It just can’t be done, if not impossible. I don’t even think the largest more complex breweries in the world could do it, if you really broke it down what you’d need to do. So this is why it’s so subjective, as it can’t really be proven. You can have papers, science and people telling you how much better/worse something is… But it doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. Oxidation for example, is what makes a barrel aged stout so delicious. Oxidation is not always an enemy. Sometimes, it's desired. What works for one person doesn't for another.

My opinion is based on my detailed tasting notes and experience with my recipes before/after my change to LODO processes. I don’t notice the special “IT” factor that some claim with lingering malt freshness and that stuff, my beers have always have excellent malt character aside from my earliest batches, of course, which oxidized and all that from bottling and poor technique. I actually think my pre-LODO Pilsners were better than the two I have done since, very nearly identical recipes. Again, I just don’t see any real difference to say that LODO changed my beers for the better. They are just as good now as they were then, minus the hassle of catching spund timings when you are busy with life and spending extra time pre-boiling to de-oxygenate or dealing with more hop debris in the keg due to the requirement to keg hop with LODO.

Other LODO benefits and my experience:

My beer clarity in the glass has not changed at all, even though now I recirculate to get brilliant wort into the kettle and then the fermenter. No finings aside from whirlfloc in the boil. No real difference for me.

My head retention from spunding has not changed… I had beautiful, long lasting whip-cream like foam on my beers by forced carbonating alone… People claim you can’t get that without naturally carbonating and spunding, not in my experience!

But again, not to say crystal clear wort and spunding don't help those factors if your process was broken to begin with. My problem is that some people preach like you will make shitty beer unless you do LODO. That mentality is just stupid.

Like you, not seeing any real changes. I keep trying and looking for it, but I don’t know… My beer is pretty epic and I love it, so that is what matters. Right?

 

For me, I feel like it would be very easy to recreate my neanderthal brewing techniques of old and what I'm doing now with LODO to compare... maybe .

I still need to figure out this head retention thing. It's driving me nuts. I was hoping LODO would help me but I'm not sure I'm seeing what I was hoping for. I think it got better but I'm still looking for whipped cream and I'm not getting there .

 

A study with a control can be performed akin to how @honkey described in post #75 by the Doemans folks:

“I talked to Michael Zepf (Director of Education) and Thomas Huber who is the director for their lab. I was told that they had done a study where pure oxygen was added throughout the entire length of the mash, lauter, boil, and whirlpool and then it was aerated like normal during the wort transfer to the fermenter. They brewed a control batch and both batches were analyzed with tasting panel and gas chromatography (Maybe I'm wrong on the second point... maybe it was HPLC). They found no differences in flavor or shelf stability.”

You would brew a LODO batch via your normal processes and then brew another batch the same way but purposefully introduce oxygen (e.g., an oxygen tank with a diffusion stone) during the early steps (e.g., mashing, sparging, boiling, etc.). Then do a side-by-side tasting and see if there is a difference. One aspect that should be easy to detect is: does the beer that was oxygenated have a darker color than then regularly brewed batch.

Cheers!

 

Amen!

Thank you for your posts in this thread. They were very useful.

Cheers!

 

Are you pouring properly? That is a big factor and I don’t think many detail out that part of their beautiful, whipped cream like foam procedure. Pour hard. Right down the middle, let settle a few minutes and continue until you have a full pour. Your foam will be standing tall and proud out of the glass and last until the very end. I never had an issue with head retention, forced carb or spunded. I have noticed no difference.

Here are three examples… Two are spunded & LODO, one is force carbed and brewed non-LODO. Can you visually spot the odd beer out?

Pils, Hefe, Kolsch in that order top to bottom.

 

One reason i like the lodo process is that it makes the brewing process easier. Milling directly into the mash tun and under letting eliminates a few steps. I've watched a ton of German brewery videos and it seems like their not really worried about 02 on the hot side. One brewery transported their wort in a propane tank pulled by a tractor.

 

It's interesting how passionate LoDO brewers seem to get about the topic. I think it's a fascinating thing that I wish we could all talk about more frequently without the debate getting so heated. As far as I can tell, there are no negatives to the majority of the common techniques LoDO brewers use. My own opinion though is that most brewers have bigger fish to fry before LoDO could be useful. The commercial brewers that use LoDO techniques have fully automated systems and have so much more control over every aspect their process. I also always like to point out that every glass of beer has approximately 1,000 flavor compounds, of which about 900 of them come from fermentation. Only with completely precise fermentation control can anyone conclusively say that a change in the hot side techniques made a difference in the final product.

I'm having trouble remembering the exact conversation I had when I was at Siebel. I believe it was John Mallet (from Bell's) that was a proponent of LoDO and that Bell's had adopted LoDO techniques. It's been 4 years since the day and it was not in class that we were talking about it, so I was drinking. The way I remember it was that Bell's believed that the shelf life of the beers was better. I don't remember claims of a better flavor or mouthfeel being made. One of my classmates was present for that conversation and for one of the discussions at Doemens. When we got to Doemens, he disagreed with one of the faculty members there (ballsy in my opinion lol). Somewhat ironically, his thought was that hop forward styles could benefit from LoDO and that the German teachers there thought it didn't matter since they were not brewing hop forward ales as their focus was on Helles and Pils for the majority of their brewing... Pretty much the exact opposite of the more common opinion that lighter German lagers benefit the most. So in that situation we had a guy that heard directly from the brewers that conducted a study complete with tasting panels and chromatography and disagreeing with their findings. He brews at Refuge Brewery in Temecula and I don't know if they adopted LoDO or not.

An important thing to realize is that a single study can reach a conclusion, but it doesn't end a debate as it is one data point. These studies need peer reviews and need to be conducted on multiple occasions, ideally by multiple breweries to be fully corroborated and confirmed. However, knowing the level of detail that they pay attention to these things at Doemen's, I personally place a lot of value on their testing.

It sounds like when you switched to LoDO brewing that wasn't the only change you made. Perhaps the difference in flavor was just the switch to no sparge brewing which could have a dramatic influence on mouthfeel and fermentability of wort. The disclaimer of fermentation needing absolute precision for anything even close to a conclusion also stands in this situation.

 

What base malts do you normally use? Do you force carbonate or bottle condition? If force carbonation, what method do you use? What sanitizer do you use and how do you clean your glasses?

 

I laugh a bit when homebrewers start acting like amateurs golfers. You know, if you bought this driver or that putter you could shave 2 strokes off your game. For just another $500 you would be a better golfer. And what's the harm anyway? That kind of thinking.

The point that commercial brewers have more control is important. We can't easily compare batch to batch. Most homebrewers couldn't control half of the variables with the degree of accuracy required. I know I could not. I unfortunately also know what tools and equipment are needed. But that doesn't mean my brewery is optimized for this sort of thing.

So unless you have a $1,000 optical DO meter and a few other important considerations, and know how to use and maintain it all, a lot of this debate is academic.

But not for a few that are trying to make a buck around here. Which is unfortunate.
Cheers.

 

What steps are you taking to try to maximize head retention?