German Brewing

Whilst this may be obvious to most, it did not occur to me at all, and perhaps could be helpful to a like minded noob like myself. Wood is very porous, and traps quite a bit of air in it - so not great for LODO operations. I noticed this when gently stirring my strike water as it cooled from boiling the O2 out. The moment it touched the water, it was basically fizzing with air bubbles. Not sure if that's the O2 reacting with the SMB, or just the air rushing out of the wood into the O2 depleted water, but no doubt it was chewing up SMB O2 allowance.

So metal, or high temp plastic!

Yeah...I don't even use my fancy wooden mash paddles, anymore.
They're all wall-hangers, now.

Helles is served from Holzfass all over Munich and people prefer it to stainless. This is not to say that wood is better, but to point out that wort or beer touching wood does not necessarily mean instantaneous oxidation.

If you've just boiled you strike water, with the intention of removing oxygen...
Using utensils that put oxygen back in counterproductive.

I still believe that the most crucial times to target oxygen mitigation are before & during the mash.
Obviously, all throughout is important...
But, if you haven't achieved freshness from the very start, all other efforts are wasted.

That was a long time ago. Most likely because it is not cost efficient as you need to repitch frequently. I've also heard from old timers that you get pitch floaties so to speak. I have seen the wooden barrel cleaning at Paulaner. It is automated. Very impressive.

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I know it's the unpopular opinion, and I'm not claiming its absolutely due to oxygen exposure - but when I was in Munich last I drank a lot of beer, including some from the wooden barrels. The beer from the barrel was always noticably worse than the beer from the regular draft tap.

The beer is served via gravity, and air is allowed to displace the beer from the top of the barrel as it flows out the tap. It tends to lose a lot of carbonation when they pour it this way too - it foams massively as it's poured, and they have to fill the mugs halfway, let the foam settle, and then finish filling. Generally speaking, I found beer served this way to taste like a glass of beer that has been sitting out for an hour or two.

Personally, I had many, many liters of helles in Munich and did not notice a correlation between quality and wooden barrels, one way or the other. Besides, all the big breweries QC their beer and they notice if something is off. I had great beers, good beers and bad beers. Helles is normally good to great, specially at the Brewery-owned restaurants (I only speak of what I had regularly, normally had Augustiner or Tegernsee or Hacker year round, and also Hofbräu in the summer (two beer gardens conveniently located). I skipped Lowenbräu when I could, and did not do a lot of Paulaner or Spaten; so if these were your wooden beers you may be right.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the beer that goes in. I think the air getting in to the barrel after its tapped slightly stales the beer over the course of hours if the barrel sits around that long. Either that, or the fact that the beer loses so much co2 coming out of the barrel that it ends up undercarbonated and that changes the taste.

I noticed the biggest difference at Augustiner. But maybe I just got unlucky. I could also see how some people who enjoy having less carbonation might prefer the beer out of the barrel.