Post-primary aeration?

[Challey]

For most of my beers, I employ a quasi-open (loosely covered) primary fermentation in bottling bucket for two or three days before transferring to a carboy with airlock to finish fermenting. This allows me to skim off the krausen periodically and at transfer, I leave the spent yeast and other debris behind. I’m convinced this results in a milder, more “rounded” beer, though this is obviously something I can’t directly measure.

I’ve always taken care to minimize splashing when I transfer the very green beer because I thought that introducing oxygen would adversely impact things. As I was reading through a CAMRA brewing book however, I saw that the author not only encourages the practice of dropping – which is essentially what I’m doing with the above – he also advocates thorough aeration of the partially fermented beer being transferred to the secondary.

Any thoughts on this? I’m planning on doing a dark mild ale in the near future and would experiment but don’t want to risk messing up a full batch.

 

[Setesh]

Goes against everything I've ever heard. It's generally considered safe to add oxygen up until fermentation has begun. After fermentation begins try to prevent oxygen contact as much as possible to prevent oxidation reactions. I have heard of adding oxygen after fermentation has begun on extremely large beers where additional fermentables are added. Beers like 120 minute for instance. This was necessary in this special case because they were attempting to push the yeast as far as possible in an extremely alcoholic environment. For a normal fermentation it wouldn't be necessary.

As far as top cropping goes that is a great way to get good yeast to use for another batch. As far as it improving the flavor of your beer I don't see how it would. You are going to crash the yeast out anyway, so I don't see where the flavor impact would come from.

 

[Cyclman]

+1 I wouldn't oxidize partially fermented beer.

CAMRA may have different guidelines, as the beer in cask, to my understanding, is to be finished rather quickly- oxidation may not be possible in the time the keg is served. Shot in the dark.