Okay, this might be a silly question, but here goes:
Lots of folks who want to store beer for long periods of time worry about oxidation. Apparently, no matter how well the cap is sealed, oxygen is slowly getting into the bottle. Would storing the bottles underwater prevent this from happening?
Damn, this was supposed to be for GQ! :smack:
I like the cut of your jib, X! Anybody who is this concerned about beer is AOK in my book. Although beer doesn’t last long enough around me to go bad.
Are we talking commercial beers or homebrew? If it is unfiltered beer, then oxidation isn’t the only problem. In unfiltered beer, like most homebrew and a few commerical beers, the yeast can begin to autolyse after it sits too long and the beer can end up tastine like Marmite.
A few years ago a brewer came out with a beer called Flag Porter that used yeast cultured from an old shipwreck. The beer itself wasn’t salvagable; but the yeast made a fine porter.
It really shouldn’t be an issue since the bottle is pressurized with co2 anyway (assuming bottle conditioning), but there are o2 absorbing bottlecaps available for lagering home brewed beer.
I recently cracked open some mead (not even carbonated) that was about 8 months old, having been in a carboy with an airlock and then in a bottle with a cork, and oxygen doesn’t seem to have been an issue. I’d say some people are just neurotic about it.
Keeping the bathwater clean might be more work than it’d be worth, and I can’t say I’d see any real benefit.
Yeah, I realize that oxygen isn’t the only problem, just curious if storing it underwater could at least stop the oxygen from getting in. I’ve got 10 bottles of Westvleteren 12 left dated 2002 that still taste great! 
Duke, maybe one of these days we’ll get together for a real poker game where we can put a few away together. I’m alot better playing at a table than I am on the net!
Your best bet would be to use champagne bottles, wine corks, wire the corks in place, and store them on their sides (in other words, like wine bottles, only with carbonation to be considered). The older belgian ales are bottled this way; a damp cork does a better job of sealing out gases than a crown cap or plastic chamagne cork.
I appreciate the advice Ethilrist, but I’m really just looking for an answer to the question ( I don’t plan on keeping beer around too long 
).
There were 12,000 bottles of #1 Bass Ale onboard the Titanic. Let’s find out – raise the Titanic and then raise a glass. I dunno how they’ve held up, but you can bet your ass that they’re cold.
A skip, jump and a hops away to GQ.
Is aspergillus niger derived glucose oxidase available at home brewing stores yet?
I know it’s used to remove oxygen from fruit juices and wine commercially, but what about beer?
It’s not oxygen from the air seeping into the bottles that causes oxidation, it’s the dissolved oxygen in the beer. It is impossible to remove all of the O2 from a bottle of beer, even at the most modern packaging plants you are going to have 30 to 50 ppb of dissolved O2 in the bottle. Heat speeds up the oxidation reactions, so the best preventative is to store the bottles cold, about 33°F would be ideal.
Additionally, the yeast need oxygen to do their thing early on in the process, after the wort is chilled and pitched. Bottle conditioned beers would have any CO[sub]2[/sub] without some dissolved oxygen.
“and deep, too…”
Homebrewers can use oxygen absorbing bottle caps
http://www.midwestsupplies.com/products/equip/bottling.asp (scroll down)
I suppose you could recap your purchased beer with these bottlecaps.
And since water itself contains oxygen (that’s how fish and other undersea-dwellers breathe) then the answer to the OP is that storing stuff underwater probably wouldn’t help a bit.
That is true, however the yeast pretty rapidly deplete the oxygen. Immediately post-fermentation is when you will have your lowest dissolved O[sub]2[/sub] levels. It is when you start moving it around (e.g. pumping it through a filter, into a bright beer tank, into a bottle filler, etc.) that it picks up oxygen. Most bottlers use a double evacuation system that fills the bottles with CO[sub]2[/sub] twice and purges them before filling with beer. Then some means is used to cause the beer to fob, or foam over, just before the crown is placed. Even with all of these precautions there is still O[sub]2[/sub] in the beer.
beagledave, oxygen absorbing crowns would work given that they were used along with a regimen to reduce total oxygen in the package while bottling. I think opening the package to the atmosphere and then re-capping would result in more air getting into the package than the crown could absorb
Oh did I forget to mention the "bottling in an nitrogen rich/oxygen free bottling room? 
