Interesting. I think this is where I need to look at what gets me bigger marginal returns. I learned decoction mashing and I made the best heff I have ever had shy of wheinstephaner. Also I did the acid rest.
I wonder though if the yeast can get into the autostilys under such high pressure. I am sure that the big guys have all of that figured out but this just basically means that we as home brewers will never have this problem. Hmm... I think I will try to do an open fermentation and cover it with seran wrap loosely to make sure that dust and stuff doesn't get in and see if it actually matters.
Actually you answered one of my most wondered about questions, why is in in every book I have read, the huge guys can ferment out a 50 to 500 barrel batch of beer in like, 3 days... push it into holding tanks for a few days and bottle and ship in under a week. I had such a hard time figuring out how they did that without either producing huge amounts of off flavors or shipping it while it was still fermenting since it takes my beer about 7 days to ferment out and that is with proper pitching rates. When I wasn't doing starters it would take about 10 to 12 days.
I have a feeling though, that I can get a bigger marginal return by doing the 113 rest for 10-20min and decoction mashing and not worrying about open fermentation so if I focus on that method I will start to produce excellent heff.
I actually am very skpetal about people saying that the rest doesn't do much, I used the Bavarian wheat yeast strain which will produce some esters but not like the weinstephan yeast strain which goes nuts and I managed to get quite a lot of clove flavor but not overpowering of what would have otherwise been a fairly muted beer. I don't think I would have done the rest with the weinstaphan as it would have just been overpowering. I used that yeast before and while I liked the flavor profile, I love the bravarian strain, it seems to give a drier, maltier beer than the weinstephan which just kicks you with banana and clove.