You'll likely run into some resistance to the necessity for a secondary to aid in flavor - but it will help with clarity somewhat.
I just read from Cheesefood's older threads in the past that the secondary wasn't really necessary so I went all cheap-o and saved the extra cash for more experimentation. I'll remember that in the future and see about buying a glass carboy for secondary use. Is the ice bath a quick, easy way to clear up the beer for now?
What exactly is the mechanism that allows beer to clear better without the yeast cake? It seems to me, rack it once or rack it twice doesn't change clarity.
You know, if you're not going to go with a secondary just yet I guess you could cold crash the primary. The timing would be a bit tight. Wait till bubbling stops, take a gravity reading to ensure FG is reached and then put it in the fridge for 2 days, then bottle.
Won't the cold really really impede the priming solution from homogenizing with the beer when its going into bottles?
Wont the priming solution going to need to be stirred in more when mixing with a nice cold batch of beer ready to go into bottles?
Again, I ask why would you think that?
If you had 2 glasses of water, one with red dye and the other with yellow, mixing them together will get you orange regardless of the temp of the two glasses. Try it and see. Cold or hot, they will mix easily. I'm not an engineer and I could be wrong, temp could somehow matter but even in that case the effect is probably inconsequential in the practical application of priming your beer.
The exception I can see would be if you had a saturated warm liquid and mixed it with a saturated cool liquid. Then the dissolved solid, sugar in this case, would come out of solution as the mixture cools. That is not an issue with mixing the wort with the priming solution.
Do a search, lots of people cold crash before bottling. The usual concern is that not enough yeast will be present to carb but experience has shown that that too is a non-issue.
Well actually it is a little (very little) harder to mix the two glasses of water if they are of a different temp. This is because the colder one is denser and would be happier to go to the bottom. A very genital stir would overcome this though. Another way of saying this in brewers terms: Fluids mix better when of the same specific gravity.
But the priming solution will be denser because of sugars, there for if it is of a higher temp than what it is being mixed into it will actually be easier to mix that if it was of the same temp as the difference in SG will be smaller.
But, and this is a big but, it really doesn't matter for this. You'll mix it a little by just pouring it which will be enough to get a relatively good mix, two turns of a spoon will mix it 10 time more than you actually need to.
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