Cold conditioning for clearing?

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Pike

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:drunk: I have reached final gravity and this is what I am thinking about doing. Can someone tell me if I am going at it the right way.
I am going to take the beer out of my carboy and into fermentation bucket for the soul purpose of leaving behind most of the sediment/spent yeast. I will then wash and sterilize my carboy and put the beer back into it. Then I am going to put my carboy into a big igloo cooler and pack it with ice. Leaving it for maybe 7-10 days. Is this the right idea and way to go about cold conditioning my beer. I am going to do this before I add priming sugar. After 7-10 days I will prime and bottle. Letting the beer come back up to 68-70 room temp, and let it sit for 14 or so days for carbonation. Then I will chill, and drink. Hopefully.
 
Personally, I don't like the idea of all these additional transfers. Each time you rack, there is potential for oxidation and infection, particularly when you're going back to an open (and plastic!) bucket just to facilitate the transfer. You're in secondary now, so the yeast trub should be fairly minimal, and there is a nice layer of Co2 protecting it from the air.

I'd just leave it where it is, and crash cool it once you're ready to bottle. This will cause most of the remaining yeast to drop out (but leave enough to carbonate,) and you'll be able to carefully rack off crystal clear beer.
 
Well the only reason I want to transfer is because I had to add more yeast to the carboy / secondary because the fermentation stopped when I transferred the first time. Bad yeast I guess. Muntons yeast from a kit is what it was. So I put another pack of safale04 into my secondary, so there is a lot of yeast in the carboy.
Should I still just crash cool it as is or..........?
 
Cold crash it as is... I cold crash mine in the primary!
 
The excess yeast won't matter with a cold crash. It’ll fall out.

If you want to accelerate the yeast drop, mix 1 tablespoon of unflavored gelatin into ½ cup of hot water and make sure it’s completely dissolved. Then toss it into your fermenter.

I stopped using secondaries several months ago and I always have 2 inch yeast cakes. Still, cold crashing and gelatin give me satisfactory results:

ClearBeer.jpg
 

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