Good to hear a report about oxygen making such a difference to your beer. But...hasn't your homebrew been generally better than what you buy in a store even without using pure oxygen? It should have been - so maybe you did something else special, too, during your last batch that contributed to a big improvement. Did you?
See, this brings a few things to mind.
First, no, the only change in the process was the addition of O2. This was something I feared a bit when I started this thread - people writing it off as a lucky batch. I am sure it is commonplace for home brewers to change a thousand processes from brew to brew, and come on here and claim, "this is the first time I did FWH and it was my best beer ever!" Was it really the FWH, or was it one of the other (literally) dozens of variables. This was not the case for me. I have been using the same yeast, mash process, volumes, brew rig, pitching rates, fermentation/wort temp control (real wort control, not a cool closet), you get the point - I can not be clearer about this; the only change was in the method of oxygenation. I can nail mash temps, and I crush my own grain so efficiency is always known. I do not have surprises on brewday or during fermentation - I just eliminate variables. I am getting bored trying to explain how repeatable my process is. Take my word for it - nothing else was done. The more I have read since starting this thread, the more the literature backs up what I am saying. Oxygen (or to a lesser degree, a boatload of aeration) needs to be a much bigger focus of brewday for all of us. I am saying this because I feel it is an important process that has been kind of ignored by the community. There are lots of methods to get the O2 into solution, but clearly, the experimentation has proved that pure O2 is second to none. So ask yourself, is your (and this is the universal "you" not the member I quoted above) method nearly as effective as oxygenation? I've actually tried both ways; have you?
And as for the other comment, about my beer not being as good as something I can buy commercially - well that is an interesting question. I did have another beer I really liked; I brewed Jamil's Evil Twin. I put it in a line-up against 4 other commercial American Ambers. I had the Stone Levitation Ale, Troegs Nugget Nectar, Troegs Hopback Amber, and Boulder Hoptical Illusion. My wife sampled blind, and said that Nugget Nectar was the top beer. However, the Evil Twin had a malt complexity that was lacking from all of the others, and it was her pick for #2. So in a blind line-up, my beer would have stacked up okay. However, if anything, this just shows how much better the beer could have been if I had been using the suggested amount of oxygen for a healthy fermentation. Maybe it would have been number 1.
The other thing worth mentioning is the fact that we can all be a little cellar blind. For example, the beer I made prior to the stout was a pale ale. I really liked it, until I tasted the stout. Now I want to dump the Pale Ale down the drain, because it pisses me off to think how much better it could have been if I treated the wort right with O2 prior to pitching. I am not going to say that every beer on the shelf at the store is better than your homebrew, but I do have to say, I think it makes you sound like a good candidate for cellar blindness if you are under the delusion that your beer is generally better than what you can buy in the store. It is simply not the case; especially if you are still under the impression that proper oxygen levels are not that important to fermentation. You may certainly enjoy drinking your homebrew more than something your bought - after all, you spent six hours making it rather than slapping $10 on the counter for a 6-pack. But from a quality control standpoint, there are very few people who have the tools to duplicate the commercial process.
I can not be the only one to talk about the improvement O2 has made. I could really use someone else with a repeatable process to buy an O2 kit, get brewing, and report back here with results. In the meantime, I will be entering my stout in 3 homebrew competitions over the next month to see if a sample of judges agrees.
Joe