Ready to bottle! Crash cooling?

My first brew is ready to bottle! It is an AHS clone of Shiner Blonde. It turned out darker than I thought it would, but it was all-lme + hops, and I boiled the LME for the full hour.

I guess my question is what is crash cooling? Will it help clarify any just a few hours before bottling? Are there any tips or tricks y'all know of to help out a first timer? I think I will bottle tonight, if I can get all of the label residue off of my bottles!!

Bottle at room temp (70+). If you cool it it will not carb. Let it carb for 3 weeks, then you can cold condition if you wish.

Crash cooling is dropping the temp down quite a bit for the last few days of secondary (or primary). I have done it over 2 days and it seemed to help. I am not sure if a few hours will be of much use. But if you can, you might as well try. Remember if you are bottling, by dropping the temp there is more residual CO2 in solution so you can use less priming sugar, this might help: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator/carbonation.html

You can bottle it cold, just raise the temp back up to carb.

Well, it looks like I won't be bottling tonight, too many dirty bottles taking too much time! I guess it makes sense, but I didn't think of the temp @ bottling having much effect.

quickerNu said:

Well, it looks like I won't be bottling tonight, too many dirty bottles taking too much time! I guess it makes sense, but I didn't think of the temp @ bottling having much effect.

Click to expand...

The temperature a bottling doesn't have a huge effect but it can result in over priming if you bottle cold. I think it would be most noticeable if you were purposely aiming for low carbonation. Example the residual CO2 at 50 is 1.2 volumes, at 70 it is 0.8. So in a beer that you want 0.75 volumes, this would be a big difference. If you aren't looking for a very specific level then don't worry about it too much.

Ended up bottling tonight for the first time. Not too bad, but cleaning the bottles was a PITA! I had cooled down the water bath in the secondary to about 45, but after racking to my priming bucket into warm bottles, I'm sure it was back into the 60's. Hope I didn't shock the yeast or anything. Not too worried about it.

Of course, I had to sample- had maybe 2 glasses, um, just to get the shiphon going. Prolly should have tried it before the priming sugar, it was pretty sweet, but tasty none the less. better than BMC crap anyway.

Looks like I have an empty primary and secondary! I need to get to work! My used bottle hookup (recycling guru hippie chick) loves wheat beer, so I might try an AHS sunshine wheat clone as payback. Maybe partial mash? hmmm....