Friend of our forum and longtime collaborator Bilsch wrote up a nice post detailing a bottle storage sensory experiment he did recently. Pretty cool stuff:
http://www.lowoxygenbrewing.com/brewing-methods/bottle-cap-oxygen-ingress-real/
Smells like confirmation bias.
I think it reflects the transition in our beers (low oxygen beers) from Stage A to Stage B flavors more than anything. Again, YMMV in matters concerning oxidation, but we just wanted to get the results out there.
Bilsch has experience on both sides of the discussion and with this beer in particular.
Cap ingress isn’t debatable, but people’s perception of the effects are. So this may not apply to your sensory analysis but the procedure was interesting, especially for people like myself who are bottlers AND low oxygen brewers. The concept of cap ingress applies to any bottler though.
The quality and potential validity of the experiment is rendered entirely meaningless when I see statements like this:
“difficult to drink and so was poured down the drain.”
Bilsch’s personal preference about the quality of beer he decides he wants to drink is a decision he made based on his own sensory analysis of a known recipe of his. Again, we shouldn’t have to make this explicit every time we post something but YMMV. It was a cool experiment whether you care for the subjective results or not.
That’s fair, I’ll agree that the concept of the experiment was cool.
I like nothing more than to agree to disagree with you Dave. 
Jokes first:
LO Brewers lands on moon, declares space only suitable location for maintaining beer freshness.
I like seeing the beers against a white background, it’s one thing I think should be done more when comparing color/clarity.
This is an interesting experiment, but it’s a bit interesting seeing this put side by side against your more rigorously tested posts. I hear the Brulosophy guys get some flak for how they do things, which brings this into starker contrast.
I think the experiment was controlled well. Same batch, same initial packaging, same storage temperature, etc. You can’t expect to agree totally with someone’s subjective opinion of their own beer, but that aside, this was a solidly controlled and executed experiment.
Not to mention it falls much in line with the linked post in the blog article with sensory and sulfite/DO tests we did, and the actual science.
This was impressively well controlled, up to the point of the tasting. Was the taster aware of the identity of each sample (i.e., to what extent was confirmation bias a potential factor)? Was only one tasting conducted? Etc.
Not a lot of information on the production methods used to make the beer. I understand there are standard tenets of LODO, but there’s certainly variation in methods. If this was posted by a non-LODO brewer, I’d expect to hear a lot of criticism on how the beer was made, the recipe, etc. My comments are more on the reporting, sorry if that wasn’t clear. Guess I should post and try to listen to “More Perfect” at the same time. Not trying to poke the bear, but just a thought on protecting your brand quality.
I’m not going to debate the actual science, that seems pretty clear. The significance and the takeaway is up to the reader as you’ve mentioned. I prefer the information on spunding/oxidation prevention that has more practical applications for my brewing.
This is a single data point. This is not intended as a sweeping commentary on all bottled beer. It is a person whose opinion and palate we trust saying that they noticed differences between the sample beers. Take that for what it’s worth. We have experienced similar degradation over time in bottle spunded beers, so the rigor of the control in Bilsch’s experiment added another layer of thought to our own empirical observations. YMMV.
Again, “forest for the trees…” here. It was a cool, but not definitive, experiment to test a hypothesis on extending shelf life in our setting.
I’d like to see this test done again but beer tested by a cap piercing dissolved O2 tester, a really good one.
As far as the write-up goes, I didn’t see anything about -unless you do it this way, your beer will totally suck- so… KUDOS!
The trick of putting the bottles in a purged keg might come in handy for competitions. It could save having to rebrew for NHC if I bottled all at once, for some reason.
is anybody really surprised that there’s O2 ingress?
Or cornie gasket?
Not really. The point was more about testing if the storage method preserved freshness rather than whether ingress occurs. In that light, it was a total success.
To Jeff’s point earlier:
this could be a good way to preserve freshness for comps as well as a method to control for oxidation in experimental situations. By eliminating cap ingress, people would have a way to store samples side by side for comparison.
I said for some reason, as I usually have those beers kegged.
I’m not surprised there is O2 ingress, but I have some skepticism about the experiment.
- To rehash another thread, how many times was the keg purged with CO2 before sealing? How much oxygen was left in the keg?
- I believe that O2 will gradually enter the bottle, but I find it hard to believe that enough could enter AND react with the beer to stale it within 90 days at 35F
As a follow up I would like to see different temperatures and different lengths of time. I would also like to see a more quantitative measurement of oxidation (not just oxygen, but the actual compounds that result from staling), although that could get quite pricey.