Let's keep this professional, impersonal and fact based...
Of course! Was that comment construed as unprofessional or personal? If so, that wasn't the intent - it was meant as colorfully worded call to the loyal and enthusiastic adherents to these techniques and procedures to counter/correct my assertions and assumptions (or possibly devolve into rabid flaming, but I was rather hoping that wouldn't be the case).
No one said the german beers of 150+ years ago are the same that they make today. In fact it's pretty much guaranteed that all beers prior to ~1900 were at least somewhat soured.
Yes low oxygen is a relatively modern thing.... if you think about it, the vast majority of advances in science... chemistry, biology, physics, etc have happened in the last 100 years. The fundamentals of all modern science is only a few hundred years old really. That should be put in perspective.
The quote is that you cannot make a decent Helles. The PDF goes no further than to say that.
Yes, the quote is that you can't make a decent Helles without LoDO.
This is a strong implication that prior to LoDO techniques (an admittedly modern process), there were no decent Helles being made (I would beg to differ - If it weren't decent in the first place, the style would not likely have caught on as if did in the 19th century). Perhaps he should have said
you can't make a decent modern version of a Helles without...
This statement, while the only one directly making such an assertion, is couched in the middle of several paragraphs talking about distinct flavor quality and characteristics of Bavarian beers, and the attention to quality that goes into making them.
So while the article does not directly say that LoDO processes are responsible for classic Bavarian beer characteristics, it does so indirectly.
Here is an example of hoe that works:
"Joe is usually a good guy. He is personable, shows up to work on time, and pays his taxes. Joe even tells a good joke or two when he's had a few. But man, I really loathe murderers. Murderers suck, and they should all go to jail, not be walking around in public. I'll probably see Joe at the company Christmas party and I'll have to talk to him."
In that paragraph, I never said Joe was a murderer. I didn't make any connection whatsoever, except to use the term Joe and Murderer in close proximity without any kind of delineation like "not that Joe is a murderer - he isn't". But the end result is that you think I am saying Joe is a murderer.
So when the article starts out praising the virtues of Bavarian beer, then talks about avoiding oxygen being good for beer, then says you can't make a decent Helles (a Bavarian beer) without low oxygen techniques, linguistically, the discussion is couched in an unspoken "you need Lodo to make good examples of Bavarian beer styles", which is an absurd notion, given that those beer styles were created and stylistically defined long before the advent of modern LoDO techniques.
That's all. If it were not the author's intention to suggest that, then he structured the article poorly.
I think there is a great deal of merit to reducing oxygen exposure as much as one chooses to trouble themselves (each brewer has to decide their point of diminishing returns or limits on their equipment and patience).
The quote is that you cannot make a decent Helles. The PDF goes no further than to say that. Some styles wouldn't taste right if made low oxygen (e.g. british styles).
No one said that. Where did you get that idea?
And you yourself (this isn't getting personal, truly, just answering the question.) recently posted something to the effect that (I'm paraphrasing, but it was a pretty strongly worded statement) if you aren't using LoDO, it's because your untrained palate can't distinguish good beer from swill and go ahead and continue drinking your bucket-fermented, oxidized, still cloudy after four weeks on the cake, etc, etc, crappy beer.
That's what I mean when I say some adherents to the process come off as suggesting (or directly stating) that if you aren't doing this, you can't be producing good beer.
I actually intend to implement some of these practices (but not milling under inert gas - I think that's just laughably ludicrous, but that's just me), but it will be interesting to see if I notice any difference, because I think I am producing excellent quality beer at this time, and any improvements will be incremental, not exponential. Therefore, only a few experiments will reveal if it is worth the extra time and trouble.
After all, at the end of the day, it's just beer, not the Manhattan Project.
