Have to say, I make all my beer in a plastic bucket initially, which is far from sealed, it doesn't even have its proper lid any more, just a cover. So initially air can get to the wort, for better or worse. After 5 days or so, it goes into demi-johns under a fermentation lock. Few more days, and as it starts to clear and the gravity reaches around 1010 (hopefully!), it's bottled. All this time, it's either in the living room, or the kitchen, which is slightly cooler, as you'd expect. I No fridges or cooling devices in involved. I have never ever had a beer suffer from 'oxidation'. I have seen queries here from posters who are nervous about even opening their FVs for a few seconds to take a hydrometer reading! Surely this is over-paranoid?
It may be that lager production, for example, is poorly suited to these basic methods, but I don't care about that, I am not such a lager fan, and there are plenty of other types of beer. But I very much take the view of the poster upthread: mankind has been brewing beer for millennia, without the need for fridges or blow-off tubes, etc etc...
I'm not saying, of course, that these things are a waste of time and have no value, far from it (and I should say that the vast majority of posters on this forum appear to know a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do, and I have learnt a lot here) just that for most types of beer, they hardly seem essential.
