Seriously? I struggled with how to answer this because I don’t want to insult you. I’ll just say that its not as many as you might think, and certainly not all. With that comment, you diss those who disagree with you.
I wasn’t being serious. Hence the winky face;)
The take away I get is the same as it always has been for me…Brewing can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be or make it out to be. People enjoy brewing for different reasons and put into it and take out of it different aspects of it all.
I compare it to fishing. One man is content fishing from the shore with a simple rod and basic gear while another guy is out on his $50k bass boat with all the bells and whistles and all the different rods and tackle you can dream of. In the end, they are both doing the same thing. Who’s going to catch more fish, who’s going to catch the biggest fish, who is enjoying it more…doesn’t it depend on the fisherman? But chances are even on a bad day fishing, that guy on the shore had a great day. The guy on the boat is probably thinking what a waste of time if he didn’t achieve all he set out to do…maybe questioning or contemplating all the different factors at play and how to improve it all.
I like to fall somewhere in the middle, I set out to make the best beer I can within the means that I have and can control…there is still a craft aspect of it to apply. Fancy, shinny equipment doesn’t make better beer if you don’t know how to fish the waters.
If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to taste it, does it leave any off flavors?
In my younger days I could tell a Dominican, Honduran, Nicaraguan, or Cuban cigar apart by taste. I smoked several cigars a week, and wrote down detailed tasting notes on each one. I had the terroir from each region dialed in on my palate and could pick it out reliably. Or maybe not, and maybe the label on the cigar set my expectations. Or maybe it was some combination of the two.
At the time I would have asserted that I had a supremely trained palate. And to be honest, I did spend years training and maintaining a mental flavor dictionary from a young age. But I have gotten a bit more humble as I’ve gotten older. I still can pick out familiar flavors pretty easily, but I have no doubts that confirmation bias plays a major role in tasting. It’s funny that I often put a beer on tap that I think is kind of “meh” at first, but after a few weeks I come back to it and end up draining that keg before the others I have on tap. When I first keg a beer it certainly gets a bit more critical analysis, but after time passes it just gets consumed out of enjoyment. Sometimes you taste the process and recipe, but sometimes you just taste the beer. The latter is almost always better than the former.
So tl;dr one man’s yeast off flavor is another’s tasty beer. And sometimes it can be the same man.
I’m kind of this way. If I use something and I just don’t like the profile, I ignore it in the future. But if I should like something (say, an English ale yeast) and I run into some kind of issue, I tend to stay away from it even though, in the end I know it was probably something I did. I had some fresh 1028 a few years back and I smacked the pack and it didn’t swell. A week went by so I decided to make a starter and when I poured the contents into the starter flask the yeast was really dark. The starter got active but the yeast had an unusual smell so I dumped it. Some amount of time went by and I got some more 1028 and it was better. I made one batch and then brewed a second batch and was going to harvest the yeast from another fermenter and when I opened that fermenter… whoa! It smelled like a sewer. Again, that had to be my fault. But I haven’t used 1028 again. 
I’m kind of that way, but usually I’ll at least give it a second chance in case I misused something.
Your take away should be do what makes you happy. If you are happy with dry yeast, stick with it. If I started to brew today, I probably would skipped learning how to culture yeast. When I started to brew, Wyeast was the sole liquid yeast producer and dry yeast was, well, to put it kindly, dreadful. Wyeast stopped shipping to the East Coast during the warm months. There were no online retailers with large stocks of liquid yeast. Brewing at the home level was truly a cottage industry with a lot of LHBS being part-time endeavors. Learning how to culture yeast was a way to have a year round supply of high quality yeast. Maribeth Raines and Jeff Mellem made life easier when they opened Brewtek. Brewtek offered cultures on mini-slant. That is how Wyeast 1450 originally came about. It descends from Brewtek CL-50 California Pub Ale. Maribeth performed the single-cell isolation for the Brewtek cultures. A lot of brewers do not realize that a liquid culture needs to be plated for “singles” (single colonies) before going to slant. Plating for singles ensures that a culture is a pure (single strain) culture.
The plate shown below was streaked from a culture I grew from a bottle of Southern Tier Live (a bottle-conditioned pale ale). Each of the well-isolated, round, white, domed colonies in the lower right-hand quadrant of the plate are the offspring of a single yeast cell. That is why they are referred to as isolates. Colonies are selected from the plate and used to inoculate one or more slants. I used to transfer one colony per slant and propagate starters from each slant, selecting the one with the best brewing properties for subculture and storage in my bank.
I will admit that brewing this way gives one a bit of a warped sense of “clean” when it comes to yeast cultures. No commercial culture can match a properly propagated culture from slant when it comes to being close to the original selected colony’s performance. That is in large part due to being a closer number of yeast cell generations to the original. It is like the difference between brewing with a fresh liquid yeast culture and the 10th bottom crop. Brewers tend to refer to crops as generation, but each crop represents four to five yeast cell generations; therefore, the youngest cells in the 10th crop can be 50 generations from the original culture.
By the way, LODO only works with a proper subset of the available brewer’s yeast cultures; namely, the yeast strains with Class O1 (4ppm) or Class O2 (8ppm) oxygen demands. LODO absolutely does not work with Class O3 and Class O4 Yorkshire strains. Our LODO friends would have a heart attack if they witnessed actively fermenting wort being sprayed on top the fermentation vessel, but those yeast strains require mid-fermentation aeration due to their high oxygen demands.
I must agree. If the malt is kilned >180F the LOX they talk about is denatured, do HSA is not a deal breaker. British beers can have a bunch of HSA, the malt is forgiving.
LODO is a mash process, unrelated to fermentation. Many add gentle boiling (aka delta TSA control) to what is called the process.
Many LODO brewers do open fermentation, so what you are describing is not incompatible with LODO. As long as yeast is active, scavenging is very bad.
It’s fair to admit that most LODO data has been validated with German lagers, so it is possible that many or all English styles don’t derive a benefit from the practice.
Sierra Nevada is now using a full LODO process, so you can use them as a control for LODO beers.
Gentle boiling, the other LODO part, is now quite common in the US as well.
Cheers,
I find it interesting that some Americans are attempting to reproduce classic German beers while some German breweries are brewing American style craft beers.
For example, the local brewery in the area where I lived in Germany began brewing beer in 1670 but in 2019 began brewing a ‘Craft Beer’ series: Hop Rider, Golden Pale Ale, Beasty Red, and on and on.
A popular (with airline crews) bar in Frankfurt featured about 50 or 60 taps…maybe more. Many craft beers from America on draft. Beers that I would not buy at home, let alone when in Germany.
If Czech beer was available at a local bar in Germany, that was my beer of choice. The Czechs make the best beer. German beer is a close second.
And this explains my fondness for Euro-Lagers. No IPA’s for me, thank you! I just gave away 5 gallons of American Pale Ale. It is an excellent beer, and my neighbor and brewing friend was thrilled to get it.
The Czechs make your favorite beer. Belgians make the nest beer.
See what I did?
As it’s subjective, the matter is wide open for debate!
Yes, my favorite beers are from the Czech Republic, with a close 2nd Place going to German beers.
We visited Brussels recently, and went to a brewery. The best examples of Belgian beers are found there, in Belgium!
Imagine that! 
That was mentioned only because I have not found one example of Belgian beer locally that I liked. Not one I considered drinkable. Not one. Belgian style beer has a strange “twang” to it, almost citrus like in nature. While I found the examples in Belgium very drinkable, it’s not my pint of beer.
I’m certain you and others have found dozens of awesome examples available in the USA.
Are the best examples of Italian food only found in Italy? No, not at all! Imagine that. But the above holds true for Belgian beer.
When I was in Vienna, my wife and I went to a craft beer place called 1516 Brewing Company. They had a range of helles and pilsners but also on their menu was something called “Victory Hop Devil IPA”. I looked at the beertender and he started laughing. In his English he said, “it’s their beer brewed here! We have a partnership”. So my wife and I got two of those and sat in the biergarten (next to some other Austrians also drinking it) and a lot of people out there were drinking it. I guess all of this just means that we want what we have and also what they have and they want the same thing… which is reasonable. There is no real reason why we shouldn’t be able to get really good German-style beer here.
No reason and yet… some places are brewing good German styles, but honestly I think a lot of the time it comes down to breweries using cheap ingredients. Regardless of process (step mash, decoction, lodo, etc.) if they’re using shite malt they’ll produce less than satisfactory beer for those light, delicate styles especially.
At least in Chicago there you have the Hopfbrau Haus in Rosemont. Cool place, wish there were more places like that here that actually brewed on premise. But honestly, I don’t have much authority on the subject since I haven’t been overseas.
The HB location in Rosemont is either closed or closing. I went there a few times but I had already been to the real one in Munich so it was a strange thing to see. But even better than the HB location is the fact that in various Chicago neighborhoods there are bars that are big on carrying fresh, German draft beer. My buds and I have been to a place called Resi’s Bierstube a few times and there are so many great German offerings that you don’t know what to order first. This is obviously one way to get good, fresh German beer. As far as brewing it… I agree with you that breweries here need to take all the proper steps and use the best ingredients they can. Over the past 10-15 years I have always given US craft breweries a fair shake when I see a helles, pils, festbier, vienna, kolsch, dunkel, etc. on the menu. But I would say that 90% of the time the beer is just not good. I had a dunkel last fall at a place and it tasted like an ashtray… as if they used a ton of black patent or something instead of Carafa or trying to use some finesse. It was dreadful and I hate to say that I could make better examples than that but… I can make better examples than that it’s just that I’m making 5 gallons at a time.
Man, that’s a bummer about the HB haus…I enjoyed myself when I went there a few years ago. There are a few places I really enjoy getting good German beer on tap - Des Moines has Hessen Haus, which is a cool place with a great atmosphere. Not so good at night though as it fills up with dbags. Moline as Bierstube, which I really enjoy as well. I miss going to these places. Thankfully, soon (April 5th), us Iowans will be able to get vaccinated more widely.