I am at 3% boil off for a 60 minute boil. I boil out of a 3”tc with a boil coil at 45%. Zero dms issues. PH is also a major factor in DMS. Get those pH’s in the 5.4 range for the bulk of the boil.
If you do a recirc HERMS, you simply start the recirc before immersing the return line/halo. Then with a tight system, you should be good to go. After a couple years of low Ox brewing, I tried a Helles without the low Ox methods and found it to be heavily oxidized, almost as badly as the German beers I buy at the local bottle shop.
I am spoiled, I know, but it truly is readily noticeable and I am not being a beer snob - if I could get fresh enough German beers, I would happily buy them. I go back frequently to buy German beers that are as fresh as I can get and while I am always hopeful, oxidation typically is very noticeable. I run them by non-BJCP friends to blindly ask them what they think and “lack of freshness” is the most frequent comment when the commercial beers are sampled as compared to my Low Ox versions. YMMV and I wish it weren’t so in my experiences.
You want a controlled addition of oxygen at the right time, i.e. in cooled, pre-fermentation wort. Oxygen is orders of magnitude less reactive with the wort at pitching temperatures than at mash temps. The rates at which oxygen will affect a chilled wort are such that an active pitch of yeast will chew through it before it could ever cause any damage.
Although I agree that appropriate steps should be taken to minimize oxygen uptake during the mash, runoff, and boil steps of the brewing process, I remember a paper that was presented at the 2014 Homebrew Con in Grand Rapids about HSA. It said in a nut shell that it was not as big a problem as originally thought. They tested an ESB that was brewed using good brewing practices (the control beer) and also where they oxygenated the hell out of the wort during mash and boil stages. They evaluated the beers when fresh, after 10 weeks in the bottle, and after 20 weeks in the bottle to determine if the excessive O2 had any adverse effects when compared to the control beer. Mind you, I would never try to repeat this experiment but the results were interesting. We also got to sample some of the control beer and the 'excessively oxygenated" beers so that we could see for ourselves.
There is also a live recording of the seminar on the AHA web site.
I am sure that noticeable effects could appear after longer aging but this was an interesting experiment. Of course, YMMV. Denny, maybe you could weigh in on this a bit more since you have had a lot more experience with oxidized beers.
The problem with experiments that attempt to analyze the affect of HSA is that their control beer is really not a control beer. If you mash in with oxygen saturated water, and are careful on the cold side, the resulting beers won’t differ significantly, i.e. the beer is already oxygenated heavily at mash in.
Remove the Low Oxygen/Standard argument for a second and just contemplate what a real control beer for an HSA experiment would be and realize that it would two separate but identical batches, with one devoid of oxygen throughout the process and one created just as in the presentation posted above. Then compare the results.
That would be a good follow-up experiment. Obviously, there have been changes in procedures since 2014 and there is more information out there but for general homebrewing (if you are not a fierce competition brewer), I think that we might be over-analyzing things. I don’t dispute your post, I am just thinking, RDWHAHB. If your beer tastes good to you and your friends, all is good with the world. If you start having oxidation problems, then it’s time to take a look at your process.
I’m inclined to agree with you WRT the simple fact that if you enjoy the beer you make then over analyzing it is a solution in search of a problem.
If, however, we want to discuss how to structure a valid comparison between two beers that analyzes a single variable such as HSA at a certain point in the process, then you have to get in the weeds a little bit and make the distinction I did.
In general, the most devastating type of oxidation is on the cold side, but there is an incredible amount of nuance and degrees of damage on the hot side as well. It’s just a matter of what you are trying to determine from an experimental point of view.
You are absolutely right though when you say that ultimately it’s the individual brewer who has to decide when and where improvements are warranted.
An ESB might be the wrong style for this. Malts kilned to 3+ lovibond have little of the compound left according to what Ricardo Fritche presented on the AHA web session.
I recall Brulosophy did a test between Pils and Pale malt in the same recipe and no one could tell the difference. Who knows that may not be a bad way to go.
