When malting my grain, I use potassium metabisulfite and hydrogen peroxide during the steeping phase. It kills all the bad guys and leaves the grain fluffy (and bleached). Never had a problem with malt aroma. Of course one should always use a small! amount! of high alpha hops and a small! amount! of flavor/aroma hops. My beers always have "it".
Peroxide? Isn't that a stronger oxidizer then O2?
I mean at one point I was thinking, If your grain bed isn't on fire, and you aren't running peroxide, nitrous, or some other strong oxidizer through it, you really can't oxidize any amino acids, sugars or starches. Then I looked around a bit more and found that the problem was fatty acids...
Mash in a modified Sanke keg purged with Nitrogen, or better yet Argon. Boil is a pressure cooker, likewise purged. Use an inline chiller to transfer to fermentation vessel to avoid all Oxygenation prior to reaching pitch temp. Simple right?
The whole thing is silly, there is enough air trapped in your grist to reach saturation in your strike water and plenty of surface area for dissolution to occur across. The campden tablet is the only thing that seems to make any sense at all, and then wouldn't you be creating sulfides rather then oxides anyway (or would they replace peroxides...)?
Can you please expound on your gas choices? IE why argon over nitro or CO2. Heavier/safer/cheaper? I am curious if purging mill setup/cooler/kettle would also be worthwhile...
Argon, if a noble gas is good enough to stop oxidation of molten Aluminium it's good enough for beer. N2 might be cheaper (it's used more in food processing since neither aerobic nor anaerobic critters will grow in it), but could react with something, maybe, kinda... CO2 has that nasty O2 component, and there is no kill like overkill!
As for worthwhile, I mean I have a cylinder of Ar for my TIG so that's not really much of an extra cost to
me, but it's not cheap. More so if you have to buy a cylinder as well. But yeah flushing the whole process up to chilling was my idea. If you REALLY want to stop oxygen contact that is. The bigger issue would be converting a 16g keg into a mash tun and finding a way to get the spent grain out after it's done, or finding a big enough sealable boil kettle.
Hmm... I suppose you could lauter to an Ar flushed corny, then scrub out and re-flush the 16g (or use a separate 8g negative pressure sealed keg), throw that over your burner and rig up some kind of airlock system for hop additions, and . . . yeah this is getting ridiculous.
But if you really want to avoid HSA, Argon is the way to go.