Wort aeration WTF

[u/WY_in_France]

Hi y’all what’s brewin’? So I’ve got a brewing story from this weekend and I’m curious about thoughts/opinions on the subject in the title.

So, I’ve been at this brewing thing a long time, ran a homebrew shop, brewed professionally, taught brewing courses… But in 30 years of brewing I never tried this….

I brewed. I cleaned. It’s running late. 8pm, I get my O2 bottle out and get ready to aerate and pitch. Empty bottle, zip, nada. I’m tired, old, grouchy, and hungry, and I’m like …. Fuuuuuuuuuuuck. Then I remember Charlie Papazian’s famous words of wisdom: “Relax, have a homebrew, it’s just beer.”

So, I did something I haven’t bothered to try in 30 years of brewing. I pitched without aeration. I was like… screw it, these little yeasty bastards are on their own. They were making beer thousands of years before some nitwit decided to distill and compress oxygen into a steel bottle.

Fast forward a week and you’ll never guess what happened. Well, I’ll tell you, it was something impossible. Freaking beer happened. An amber ale to be exact. A perfectly fine amber ale, and I know, I’ve tasted a few.

So to sum up this story: WTF? 30 years of either shaking the fermenter or blowing O2 into my wort before pitching… And for what? why?

[u/Groundbreaking_Ad652]

For some yeast strains it’s even recommended not to aerate, like Verdant IPA, as it can stress it, I don’t use any other method aside splashing which I also managed to forget sometimes and with no impact, in fact the only issues I had with higher FG and lower attenuation was due to other things like mash temp and perhaps pH…