Best thing to do is try it yourself. It's not that hard... Pre-boil your strike water, add the recommended sulfite dose, cool it to strike temp, underlet the mash, stir it good once, use a mash cap. After 15 minutes take a sample and taste it. You'll know right away if you got it right. If you didn't get it you missed something in the process and need to review it and try it again. All this is well documented.
Well said.
A lot of naysayers likes to throw around confirmation bias as an explanation, and i get it. But in this instance the difference in the wort flavor is so stark when you get it right that it's beyond confirmation bias.
I believe there's a significant dissonance thing among many of those who argue against lodo, besides the fact that many of those don't know what they're talking about.
We all have invested time, effort, money, and attention to fine tuning our brewing processes to produce decent beer. The learning curve, sometimes, is long. To accept that LODO might be a thing, and then potentially adopt it, we'd have to accept/admit that the time, effort, money, and attention we put into where we are now is a wasted, sunk cost,
as there may be a better way.
I felt that to some extent when I tried BIAB. I'd spent all this time dialing in my system with a traditional mash tun, getting temps right, and so on, and now you say there's an easier way? What about all that knowledge I developed? I just have to throw that away?
Then there's the tacit, perhaps unconscious, awareness that there *will* be a learning curve with any new approach. I personally find that somewhat painful, and I have to acknowledge that with a new approach my beer, the first time or two, might not be excellent. That pain is, fortunately, balanced against the joy of learning something new.
Is it the case that this dissonance, in many of the anti-LODO crowd choosing to denigrate LODO, is their psychologically more satisfying conclusion? If one can deny its validity, then one doesn't have to change anything!
There is a legitimate question of preference though. Do YOU prefer it? Only the drinker can decide that for themselves. You can legitimately not like a beer with low oxygen process and that's fine. My personal experience is that I prefer all my beers low oxygen now. It was the key change in my process that took my lagers to the next level and my IPAs are friggin epic now. Still amazes me every time i take a sip that i wasted 7 years of home brewing making mediocre IPAs when the only thing i had to change was excluding oxygen from the mash and keg.
Some of my beer has also been, to use your term, Epic. But some flavors haven't been all that enjoyable. I've brewed a Czech pils with a punch of flavor unlike anything I've ever experienced. Others raved about it, too. But I don't care for it all that much.
It's sort of like the oxidized beer thing--some cannot easily perceive oxidation so they may say "it doesn't matter." Well, it doesn't--to them. Same, I believe, with LODO approaches. It produces a very different beer, with very different flavors in some cases. But that may not be a good thing, depending on one's palate. We like what we like.
If someone has tried LODO beers and the flavors just don't ring their bell, then they're drawing a conclusion from a position of knowledge. I'm ok with that. I don't like Belgians, that's just a personal preference thing.
But when people oppose the technique when they have no direct knowledge of it...well, there's only one reason for that behavior that makes sense to me.