Bottle conditioning

One person here struck fear in my heart saying "don't bottle condition anything that's going to sit a long time! It will autolyse!" (sp). Can anybody base this on experience or is it another case of theoretical smoke?

I want to avoid force carbonating if i can. It's a barley wine now fermenting

photogscott said:

One person here struck fear in my heart saying "don't bottle condition anything that's going to sit a long time! It will autolyse!" (sp). Can anybody base this on experience or is it another case of theoretical smoke?

I want to avoid force carbonating if i can. It's a barley wine now fermenting

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Your fine Rdwhahb..

How long do you plan on having it sit?

A barley wine won't reach its peak for at least a year in my opinion. Ive got a wood aged belgian imperial stout which I brewed after my wedding, I didn't touch it until our first anniversary and it will get better over the next few years. If your sanitation and brewing techniques are solid there is nothing to worry about for a beer like a barley wine.

IMO, he was blowing smoke up your *ahem*, or at least trying to. It's been proven time and again, that autolysis is not something you need to be worried about. That is, unless you hit a 'perfect storm' of conditions (that's rare to happen) when you brew, ferment, then bottle/carbonate a batch.

I split a bottle of a batch that was brewed almost a year ago, on Saturday (brewed 4/7/11, bottled 5/15/11). It tasted just as great as the last time I had a bottle of it. This is/was a brown ale, at about 6% ABV, so not even something big.

Autolysis is a very real phenomena, but with the small amount of yeast we leave in the bottles, it is not detectable, so you don't need to worry about it.

If anyone wants to know what it is like, take a pint of the slurry from your next batch and put it in a mason jar. Leave it at room temp for a couple of months (occasionally releaving the pressure) and then smell it. Same beer with the same yeast as you have in the bottle, except in a much higher concentration.

Thanks people for relieving SOME of my anxiety.
It's fermenting steady but slow so I'm going to move it from a 65 to 72 degree environ out of fear of stuck fermentation.
When I used my better hydrometer for the OG, it almost floated out of the vial! HA!! 1.116 is new and exciting.

If its worthy, I'll enter it next year at AHA. So yes it will sit a long time