Early on when we were trying to figure out how to get "it" (before we came up with LoDO), we reasoned that the key had to be a process issue and not some magic ingredient, because almost all of the commercial German stuff has "it" but no American stuff does, and it didn't make sense that every German brewery was sprinkling the same secret fairy dust into their beer. It had to be something fundamental that everybody in Germany does without even thinking about it, but nobody here does. And it had to be pretty hair-trigger, something sensitive that demanded flawless execution - otherwise, somebody in the USA surely would have nailed it simply by accident.
LoDO isn't a perfect process, it's a poor man's band-aid solution to problems that have much better solutions at a large scale. Being able to dough-in with effectively zero oxygen uptake into mechanically degassed water using a vormaischer, followed up by vessel volumes with a fraction of the surface area to volume ratio of a homebrew system is a real blessing. There were some reports in early 2016 from people who asked some pros about the LoDO process who said that it was overkill, especially the usage of SMB, but frankly I think those pros are so used to large scale commercial systems and are unaware of how a small homebrew system enormously exacerbates oxidation. The exception would be Kunze, who I think recognized the difference and outright states in his book that it is practically impossible to brew low oxygen on a pub brewing system so you shouldn't even try - I mean zero disrespect to him whatsoever, but I think that GBF proved him wrong there.
It's really great to see so many more people enjoying success - it definitely takes a hell of a lot of dedication and time to fine tune the process for each individual system - something that I hope the bloggers out there doing A/B testing can recognize and understand. Due to the nature of the "it" flavor being like an egg - once you drop it, you can't put it back together - we frankly would have never in a million years come up with the LoDO process if we methodically followed the mentality of "change only one variable at a time and only evaluate the finished, kegged beer". We knew subjectively from the moment we tasted preboiled + sulfited wort that we were on to something, but every batch we brewed would go downhill fast and at a different part of the process. So in the end, developing LoDO became a trial-and-error game of brewing a batch, tasting it at every step of the way, and subjectively identifying where flavor loss was taking place. I would like to think that the success of LoDO should be taken as proof positive that subjective tasting is indeed worth a lot after all and shouldn't be dismissed outright.
As far as a festbier recipe goes, I think 30% dark muma + 3% caramunich III is going to be darker than the big 6 commercial festbiers, but that shouldn't stop you from brewing it. You may find that you like it better. If you want something a bit closer to a commercial example, I think 5-10% light muma + 10-15% vienna + 5% or so carahell is a good starting point.Statistics: Posted by Techbrau — Wed May 03, 2017 9:37 pm
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