I'm not going to multi quote
@mongoose33 and destroy the entire post line by line. It was a good enthusiastic post that attempts to defend his unnecessary use of pure O2 in a stir plate starter.
Well, as I said, we'll have to agree to disagree. Without any evidence other than your enthusiastic attempts to denigrate a reasonable approach, we'll have to assume you're just guessing.
But that's OK.
Faster fermentation is a claimed benefit and he is willing to report how quickly his batch takes off by looking for an airlock bubble. The first airlock bubble is an indicator of fermentation happening several hours before the bubble occurred. Different fermenters have different head spaces. Not all air locks are the same. So observations of early bubbles is generally not a fair comparison outside your brew house.
How ironic. On the one hand, you argue that oxygenating starter wort is a potential source of infection, which it is. But you don't see any benefit to fast fermenation takeoffs which, if there are bad microbes in the beer, can outcompete them.
That's....interesting. My son is a microbiologist and he's the one who explained this to me. I choose to believe him, and not so much, you.
That said, my regular stir plate starters are typically pitched at 4-6pm and the fermenters are typically bubbling sometime around 12pm-3pm the next day using a very long blow off tube. They would bubble a lot sooner with a regular airlock.
Sounds like the yeast are stressed. Otherwise, they wouldn't take nearly 18-20 hours to take off. Or, perhaps they'd be more inclined to GO if you'd oxygenated the starter.
I'm sure you and the people that like to drink your beer think it tastes good. It probably does. No, I have not infused pure O2 into a stir plate starter because my beers have never exhibited yeast derived defects that might be cured with your redundant O2 starter method.
OK, thank you. It *is* good. And I don't just rely on my own evaluation of it, though there's nothing inherently wrong with that. I rely on what others tell me as well, and I use the "do they have a second one" indicator of whether someone likes my beer or not.
Now, here's an interesting thing. Just because you can't detect yeast-derived defects doesn't mean they're not there. It might just mean that you can't detect them. BTW, this is the kind of thing a scientist looks for--an alternative explanation for results. Perhaps you just can't taste the defects.
Cavalierly dismissing the unnecessary O2 starter infusion as a possible source of infection is something a self proclaimed scientist should rethink. Propagation of unwanted microbes in a starter never ends well.
There are a million possible sources of infection. Cavalierly assuming that I'm unaware of or dismissing the possibility of contamination would presume that I am unable to manage my process to prevent that.
I get that you don't want to do this. It's the same reaction of people to low-oxygen brewing, or to BIAB. Once they have their process down, they don't want to hear there may be a better way. So they'll denigrate the new method even though they have no experience with it.
I am a scientist. If one is trained well as one--I'd like to think I am--then the name of the game is to look for reasons why one is wrong, not why one is right. It's what science is. You see, we're both looking for the same thing, evidence that oxygenating starter wort is either useless or even harmful. But I'm doing it to test my theory; it appears you're doing it because you're threatened by it.
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