I don’t dry hop much or enter competitions, but this is where I’d start. Attack this like a process engineer. Otherwise you risk “fixing” problems that aren’t problems.
And unless you have a DO meter handy, you’re going to have to investigate by taste.
Bottle a bottle and leave it on your counter for a week or two (or however long the typical lag is from bottling to judging). Then do a quick triangle test with a friend or two and see if you can consistently pick out the bottled beer. If you can, then you can reasonably conclude that the problem is in the bottling. If not, then you have to look upstream of the bottling. Proceed iteratively until you can isolate it to a particular process step.
I have coveted this gage, but I can’t find it anywhere! I will say - I was recently gifted a bench capper, and though I can’t test the capping with a go/no-go gage, the capping feels tighter, and the “pffft” feels consistently longer and more robust.
Certified Judge here, and I judged at a competition on Saturday. We had exactly two entries that were oxidized, one badly and the other less so. HOWEVER, a quick read tells me that you are using your Beer Gun wrong. Before you use it (like, 30 minutes before), put it in the fridge along with all tubing you’ll be using. You want it to be chilly so the beer doesn’t foam, and DON’T FILL WITH FOAM. All of that foam is liquid around air since that air is coming from somewhere. Lower the pressure on your keg to a crawl and take your time. Always cap on foam but fill your bottles with liquid!
Gordon Strong advised to fill your bottles to the top once your beer is carbonated right, since it will be perfect once the sample is poured and there are no points taken off for a high fill.
I am skeptical about the importance of this. It implies that the caps are not adequately sealing the bottles and O2 is somehow diffusing into the bottle against the pressure of CO2 in the bottle. Not likely. You can also verify the bottles are sealed adequately by the fact that they don’t lose carbonation over time.
I also am skeptical that a bottle needs 45 sec of CO2 purge. I am sure that commercial brewers aren’t anywhere but a fraction of that and I never hear that store bought beer is chronically oxidized. CO2 is heavier that O2 and even given the turbulence from mixing, the O2 levels have to drop fast as Co2 is introduced.
Finally I don’t think bottle aging is really any different than Co2 purging. Think about it. Adding sugar water to each bottle means putting uncarbonated beer into a bottle that needs to be purged first. Achieving a constant and desired level of carbonation is the only benefit I see of doing this. If there is O2 left in the bottle, adding carbonated beer or priming uncarbonated beer wont make any difference.
Good suggestion about chilling the gun and filling the bottles full with liquid. I don’t chill the gun (Last Straw from NB) or hoses because it is too long and they are too bulky for my fridge. However I find it easy to control too much foam being generated during filling by putting all my bottles in the freezer for at least 15 minutes. Since I only bottle the end of the keg or for competition I am rarely bottling more than 6-10 bottles.
I’m a chemist. I don’t see how Dalton’s law affects diffusion of 2 gases separated by an impermeable barrier (the bottle of seal on the cap). The pressure of a MIXTURE of gases is determined by the sum of their individual pressures, but there is no way I know of for O2 to diffuse through glass or metal They are not mixed. Please explain.
The best cap seals let about 1 ppb/day through, other cap let more in per day. 20 ppb total dissolved O2 at packaging is is a low number. With time you get to numbers that will show oxidation in the beer.
Cans with good triple crimp seals let 0 O2 through.
Sierra Nevada went from twist off caps to pry off crown caps in 2008 to reduce oxidation. I had verticals of Bigfoot Barleywine years back where there was a very noticeable difference from 2008’s oxidation level to 2009.
I don’t know if I agree with that. I’ve always known it to be capping on foam. Since the foam is filled with CO2, it will displace any oxygen. If you cap with foam overflowing, how could O2 be in there?
I really think the main issue is the crimp on the caps.
“ Cap on foam” isn’t the same as filling it with foam. OP says they fill it with foam. This is foolish.
OP is using a wing capper, not a bench capper, and it would cause a problem with the security of the caps, as you pointed out. I made the move to a bench capper for a similar reason.
A purged bottle is a very different thing in terms of oxidation than an unpurged bottle. That’s what I have to say about your idea of some magical CO2 force formed. Proof beats your speculation.
Ever since adopting Gordon Strong’s Brewing Better Beer, I have been told the way I brew is inferior. So, I needed data to validate my processes and techniques. The only way I could think of was to have my beers anonymously evaluated. To get that evaluation, instead of sending every beer to a lab, I began shipping beers off to competitions.
I entered three competitions in 2023 and medaled in two of the three. I received some pretty interesting feedback from those earlier beers. Some mentioned oxidation.
I follow several of the low O2 principles outlined by the Low O2 push that happened a few years ago. So, those oxidation comments were a dagger.
I reviewed all my processes and determined the weakest link was my bottling technique. So, I went down the road of how to bottle for competitions. I got a TapCooler thinking better counter pressure techniques would solve the issue. I resumed competitions in 2024 but was still getting oxidation comments.
As you can imagine, I can point to an exact beer when I began to employ better bottling techniques: 45 sec CO2 purging, bottle refermentation, and bench capping. In 2025 my scores have increased dramatically and I began placing higher and more often.
I understand skepticism. I assure anyone interested, if these techniques didn’t work I would quickly abandon them and move on. I have a very low PITA tolerance. However, I have the data. They seem to work.
BTW, if home brewing beer/mead/cider is one hobby, I submit that competition home brewing is a second distinct hobby.
Oops, I meant to say “top with foam.” Of course it would be foolish to fill with foam. It is maybe 3/4-1" of foam at the top of the bottle, and bottling with the cap on top of it.
But I am using a wing capper (which I will replace with a bench capper).
For those of us chasing oxidation challenges, it’s at least worth considering this approach. It wouldn’t be hard to try, and the end product could be compared with other methods pretty easily since this method is simply diverting beer pre-carbonation.
Regarding competitions - this is true in other hobbies, so it would stand to reason it plays out here as well. Roses are a classic example. There are people who live to exhibit roses, select roses for their exhibition qualities, and so on. Then there is the garden-rose crowd (I am in this group). I have zero interest in exhibiting roses. It is just not the driver for me for this hobby.