To cold condition or not

I just kegged and bottled my first batch of brew and was wondering if I should leave it at room temp for a few weeks or put it in the fridge and let condition at cool temps. It is an ale.

let it carbonate at room temp for a while. later you can move it to lower temperatures to condition, but i wouldn't stick it in your fridge until it's ready to drink, unless you have it temperature controlled at 50-55

He's probably going to force carb so that's not an issue. But I'm curious too. When to cold condition, for how long, at what temp?

Well, if you are kegging and force carbing, then you want to get it cold right away and keep it cold as this will assist in the carbonation process.

If you are naturally carbing in bottles or kegs, you should wait at least 3 weeks before cold conditioning as the yeast need the warm temps to convert the priming sugar to CO2.

I'm not sure what the OP is doing since he stated he bottled and kegged his beer.

Personally I don't cold condition my bottled beers, just put them in the fridge to cool them to serving temps when I am ready to drink them. My kegs stay cold the whole time though.

I would say that you want to leave beer at it's ferment temp for a while to allow the yeast to clean up the residual byproducts of the active fermentation. Once you go to cold condition, it's really at serving temps where the yeast become inactive. Due to my impatience, I typically cold condition at the same time that it's carbonating in the kegger. I try my best to leave the serving line disconnected so that I'm not tempted to pull a pint. This is a good arguement for buying more cornies than you think you need and brewing twice as often too.

When I bottled, I used to leave them warm until ready to drink. However, I just recently had a beer that I stashed in the fridge for a good month. I meant to drink them earlier but just forgot about them. The chill haze was settled out and there was no yeast flavor at all. There is obviously an advantage to letting the bottles chill for a couple weeks.

I naturally carbed the beer because I split the batch between bottles and keg. Bottled a twelve pack and kegged the rest.

The beer i put in the keg was sealed up and then hit with some CO2 to hopefully fill the extra head space.

then you'll want the keg to sit at room temp along with the bottles until it ferments that extra sugar.

i cold condition the secondary for a week before kegging. You'd be surprised how much more you can get to drop out by doing this.

When using natural carbonation, the fermentation process restarts, although in a much smaller scale. The yeast must ferment the sugar, then clean up the byproducts of fermentation as in the secondary phase. Because the yeast population is much smaller, the process can take up to and beyond two weeks for full carbonation. Once the bottle/keg conditioning phase ends, the beer begins aging. Aging typically rounds out any rough edges in the beer and can remedy many imperfections.

It would then logically follow that your (bottled) temps should have some kind of a connection with the fermenting temps.