Hopefully this isn’t too much of a tangent, but I was dumping some old bottles of home brew about a year ago and noticed significant changes to my O2 scavenger caps over time. It was even more obvious in person versus this photo, but the older batches had a lot more/bigger bubbling in the cap liner. These were caps from 1, 2, and 3-year old batches (clockwise from the top). I never doubted that O2 ingressed over time, but this still caught my eye.
Thanks for volunteering! [emoji41]
The neat thing about this is , believing and science don’t need to coincide for it to happen. A little google work will show you all the studies of cap ingress and beer staling limits. Gas laws are gas laws. Staling limits are staling limits. After that it’s simple math for when they coincide.
We did similar tests last year (linked at the bottom of the article)with bottled beer that was bottled under a triple vacuum/purge cycle and saw very similar drop off, hell I noticed flavor drop off in a few weeks and the sulfite/DO tests confirmed. Russ’s tests used bottled spunded beer so he had less oxygen in the bottle to start than I did, so that bought him some more time.
Cheers.
That’s a good idea, but it might not show anything, especially after three months. Measurable DO drops over time as the oxygen reacts in the beer. It creates the staling effects and the beer might taste awful, but still read 10ppb. I’ve seen this happen over the course of a day. Get a high DO reading on a bottle (100ppb+ is our limit). Recheck it the next day and it’s reading 12. Of course at that point the damage is done.
This experiment was based on a low DO beer, but I’d be curious how low? Based on testing my own homebrew, a gravity fed, hand capped bottle, I’m starting out at well over 1000ppb. We just can’t fill as well as commercial beers. I would think for most homebrewers, the cap ingress is certainly real, but the difference may or may not be noticeable. In this case it was, under a very strict set of circumstances. I think the experiment was very well done, just curious what the results might mean to the average homebrewer.
It was bottle spunded, so zero, or very close to zero.
No. Ingress has been discussed for years. Most of us have suggested kegging over bottling since the early days not only because of ease but also because of keeping the beer fresh.
Since all the talk of DO on the forum lately does anyone know what the ingress of o2 through a corny keg lid/disconnects/popettes, etc are? I guess I’m in a position to figure that out. Might be a fun experiment.
It’s just going to depend on the gasket material.
Not surprised at the values as Tires have a Butyl inner layer to keep them from losing air.
I thought the role of the LODO process is to preserve the fresh flavors of the beer and delay staling?
If so, it seems like a beer brewed by all the right LODO processes should be better than a drain pour after ninety days at near freezing temperatures. In fact, you would have to accept as true that all bottled beer is drain pour quality in ninety days or less because even the largest German brewers producing whatever you think is the gold standard for LODO beer suffers the same bottle cap ingress. Their beers are not transported or stored under pressure with CO2. That seems like painting yourself into quite a corner.
That was my thought too. However we should never present any facts that some will choose not to agree with.
We need to make a distinction here before the dialogue back and forth gets distorted: Just because Bilsch chose to dump the handful of bottles he saved as controls due to the fact that HIS sensory analysis of the beer showed fault, doesn’t mean that every other brewer in the same situation would have done that also. The main goal was to see if the storage method mitigated cap ingress, and to his taste buds it did.
This isn’t an indictment of all bottled beer based on this single data point. It is true, however, that many commercial beers going through the distribution chain are degraded after even 90 days. That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy a 3 month of Weihenstephan, I just recognize that there are characteristic oxidation flavors happening at that time interval where I can get it.
Cap ingress is a fact. The degree to which each person interprets the flavor hit is different. We should not conflate Bilsch’s subjective opinion with fact. His opinion does, however, align with what many of us have tasted after bottle spunding, i.e. muted hop aromas over time, loss of the fresh malt flavor we try hard to preserve, etc. The experiment was conducted to test a hypothesis: will storage conditions affect cap ingress? In that light, it was a success, because it gave us a control to base further explorations on.
As always (it’s frustrating to always have to end with this, but it’s true), YMMV.
^^^^
3 month old Weihenstephan I rarely see! Always older. But some German breweries seem to have better packaging or process than others. For several years now I have refused to buy anything from the Paulaner/Hacker-Pscorr grouping. No matter how fresh the date code may suggest it is, it has all been heavily oxidized. Deep into stage C. What gives?
For every passionate beer distributor, there are dozens to whom beer is purely product. This stark difference between those who handle and stock the beer you love explains it. Shelf life is based on the assumption of cold storage and proper handling. You can imagine that the temperature variation beer experiences alone staling much of the product out there.
A little googling turned up this reference (http://www.thebruery.com/careful-cellaring-part-2-the-importance-of-temperature/) to a graph from Bamforth’s 2004 book (Beer:Health and Nutrition):
Did you have some other reference in mind? Would you care to share it?
To be clear: I accept that oxygen will get into the bottle, and I accept that oxygen will eventually cause staling. I also accept that the rate of chemical reactions is a function of temperature.
Yep, there are about 5 distributors serving the local market. I’ll have to carefully check which ones handle what breweries (I’ll just ask the beer and wine steward at the supermarket. He’s also a Cicerone, so should already be aware of the problem.) I wouldn’t be surprised if I could narrow it down to one distributor and just beware of their goods. Years ago Paulaner was a safe bet.
There were some nice slides in Ken Grossman’s 2009 keynote speach when he was talking about changing from twist off to pry off. That file is no longer up.
Some info as to not all cap materials being equal.
http://brookstonbeerbulletin.com/sierra-nevadas-new-pry-off-cap/
We need to keep in mind here that we are not talking about zero to wet cardboard here. We need to move this dialogue away from the insinuation that everyone’s beer is displaying “Stage C”, stereotypical oxidation flavors. We are not interested in those flavors because very few people are getting to that stage unless they seriously mishandle their beers.
We are much more interested in the more nuanced flavor hits you take from transitioning from “Stage A” brewery fresh flavors to the onset of “Stage B” flavors, i.e. onset of hop aroma and flavor loss, cloyingly sweet malt flavor, etc. I have it happen to me reliably when a bottle spunded batch starts to run out.
So the graph you linked is nice, but it just tells us the obvious: you need to beat the hell out of a beer to get it to start noticably staling, i.e. “Stage C”.
Arguments about staleness, in an odd twist of irony, seemingly never get old. We need to find a way to capture that so we can add it to our beer.
I’d say discussion is more an apt term. If you call something an argument for long enough it will eventually become one. 
I guess I just don’t understand what you are saying. If it isn’t noticeable, then who cares?