Bottling and the Oxygen Problem

Okay, I've been reading Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation, I'm about halfway through it, should've been done long ago, but I have the attention span of a fruit fly, and seeing as how I'm bottling tomorrow, I started thinking about something I read about oxygen requirements and aeration. So I went back and found this chart:

Method of Aeration-------------Observed O2 PPM
Shaking, 5 minutes-----------------2.71ppm
30 seconds, pure O2---------------5.12ppm
60 seconds, pure O2---------------9.20ppm
120 seconds, pure O2-------------14.08ppm

So my point is this, everything that I've been told and read and seen on these forums, says to be very careful while racking and bottling not to let the beer splash and stir very gently and blah, blah, blah so as not to aerate the beer.

So if shaking for 5 minutes only produces 2.71ppm and the desired rate is 8 - 10ppm, then won't a small splash here or there only produce a negligible amount of oxygen that is going to be used up by the yeast fermenting in the bottles anyway?

Am I way off base on this or is this a valid thought? Am I overthinking this? Is Revvy that careful when he bottles?

edkittley said:

Am I overthinking this? Is Revvy that careful when he bottles?

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Well, I try to be careful, but I don't panic if I get a little splashing happenning. You kinda hit the nail on the head to what I've been saying for years whenever someone panics because they think they did something major to their beer when they make what I would call a smple mistake.

This has been my pat answer for years....

Revvy said:

It takes a lot of splashing to do any damage, someone on basic brewing years ago, (Palmer, or Chris Colby of BYO) said that in order to truly provide enough O2 to oxydize our beers it would take pumping an entire one of our red oxygen bottle/airstones into our beer AFTER fermentation is complete.

Most of the splashing intentional or accidental that we do in the course of our brewing will not harm it...

That doesn't mean you want to dump your carboy into the bottling bucket, or do other careless things. You still want to be gentle when moving your beer from vessel to vessel.

BUT it doesn't mean that if we splash, or have to use our autosiphon to pump our beer if something goes wrong, that we need to panic about it.

I've had all sorts of problems, like bottling a blond ale with peaches in it,that kept jamming the bottling wand and auto siphon, and the beer's still turned out just fine.

And beside Oxygenation damage isn't immediate anyway, most of us would have our beer drunk long before it would happen.

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But I'm talking about those little mistakes we make in a normal situation. BUT some folks lately have been recommending some things that are a little more risky, like if somene has a bottling issue, openning all the bottles into their bucket and re-adding priming sugar, that's a little more rough on the beer that a few extra strokes with their autosiphon.

I'm usually the first one to say RDWHAHB where that is concerned, as I think, this thread What are some of the mistakes you made...where your beer still turned out great! shows.

But if something looks to be a little beyond that level of "safety" I'll be the first to question the voracity of it.....