Nature doesn’t always follow logic. We’ve seen this many times in home brewing. What we think should be happening isn’t.
Maybe ask Deschutes Brewery. From what I understand they add yeast to the bottles of their hop fwd beers to consume O2. It could be a referment in the bottle like the Belgians do.
...but this seems to confirm interviews I’ve heard with Dr Bamforth. He says if a beer is oxidized to run some yeast thru it. He doesn’t say it has to be actively fermenting — just present. ...but this may need clarification.
Maybe Experimental Brewing podcast can get to the bottom of this for us — to clarify this statement and get an explanation of how it works.
This should be relatively easy to quantitatively test for someone with a filter and a DO meter.
- Expose a fully fermented & filtered batch of beer to oxygen
- Package half with no yeast, and half with added yeast
- Check DO levels at varying lengths of time
To minimize the confounding variable of whether or not refermentation occurred, ferment the original batch with a highly attenuative yeast (such as 3711 or Belle Saison), and repackage with a minimally attenuative yeast (such as Windsor).