Cold Crashing Question.

I've looked all over the boards and seem to get conflicting answers.

1. When you cold crash it makes the weak yeast die and the healthy yeast go dormant. So when you bottle later, you can still prime for bottle conditioning when the healthy yeast "wake up".

2. Cold crashing just kills all yeast regardless of their condition.

...Which is it??

Niether fully, #1 is closer. Nothing short of longterm deep freeze will even kill most yeast.

Cold crashing is just a way to make almost all of the yeast go dormant, and fall out of suspension. You really dont want to do it unless you are bottle conditioning a beer made with a lager yeast strain. Cold craching is best with a kegging system.

You really dont want to do it unless you are bottle conditioning a beer made with a lager yeast strain.

Click to expand...

That is true for beer, but cider is a little different. lager yeasts are resistant to cold crashing, which is why they work in beers, but they dont work very well in ciders. The basic idea for cold crashing cider is that nearly 100% of the yeast drop out of suspension and you siphon the yeast free cider.

ale and wheat yeasts are better for cold crashing, because they tend to flocculate more completely and compactly. Based on experience of myself and friends, if you have a fridge and enough brewing experience so your siphon technique is decent , use ale yeast and cold crash with residual sugar somewhere in the range of 1.005 to 1.010, chances are very good that the cider will remain stable until it is consumed.

You must exercise care if you do this. typically you do this to stop the fermentation before the residual sugar is gone, in which case you dont want to re-introduce any yeast or it will eat up the sugar, potentially creating bottle bombs. You need to use a keg to carbonate, or else drink it still, like wine.

For people cold crashing for the first time I would recommend letting the cider sit in the secondary for at least a month after the crash to make sure it stays stable (unless of course you want to keg and drink it before then).

Thank you very much. Very helpful. I did use an Ale yeast.

Thanks Again!