I keg the majority of my beers. The beers that I bottle tend to be 2.5 gallon batches of Belgians and 1 gallon trial batches. Sometimes I get lazy with purging the headspace thinking it does not really matter that much outside of an NEIPA. Well..
I recently cracked open bottles of a Marris Otter + BRU-1 SMaSH beer that I split with Lutra, Voss, and US-05. The beers had been bottled about 6 weeks at that point and stored at room temp. In the picture below, you can clearly see visible signs of oxidation in the US-05 glass in the center. That beer tasted stale with notes of paper and muted hop flavors. This was a 3 gallon batch with 2.25 oz of hops total (0.75 oz at 10 min, 1.50 oz in a steep).
Does that mean that Lutra and Voss will eliminate oxidation when bottling? Despite them looking nice, they both had muted flavors. I did not get the nice grain character and bright BRU-1 hop character that I remember when the beers were fresh. They both reminded me of that "bland homebrew" taste.
This made me think I need to pay more attention to oxidation with every beer that I bottle. I guess I should have expected it with this batch, but I want to do more trials with beers like the Saisons and Dubbels that I often bottle without any steps to avoid oxygen in the bottle. Well, I do bottle directly from the fermenter adding sugar directly to the bottle, but I have been leaving the standard headspace from my bottling wand.
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