Temps and cold crashing question

First of all, I am not really worried, nor am even contemplating dumping my batch

Anyway, my batch is at a full week in primary fermentation. I am planning on letting it go til thursday or friday and then rack to secondary for another 10 days or so. I did the Texas Bock kit from AHS. Ideally it should have been lagered. My brother has a fridge that he is planning a kegerator out of. i was going to put it in there, but did not want to tie up his fridge for that long. I fermented at room temperature (actually a little on the warm side unfortunatly the room it was in is the warmer one in the house, next time i'm moving rooms).

I am thinking about cold crashing in my brother's fridge (it already has temp controls). If ya'll think this is a good idea, I was thinking about crashing it at a certain temp (what is a good temp to cold crash?) and then raising the temp by 5-10 degrees every few days to get it closer to room temperature for bottling.

is this a bad idea? am i better off just putting it in a cooler room in my house? THanks for your input.

Well, since you fermented it warm the yeast will have formed a lot of esters. If you find you don't like the taste, the longer you leave it on the yeast cake the more chance it will have to clean a bit of that up. If you like it go ahead and rack it. The max is 3 weeks but some people go longer.

You can leave it on the secondary longer than 10 days depending on how you like the taste. I would definitely do this in the cooler room.

Cold crashing and lagering would be a good idea. It will clean it up even more. Again, it all depends on how you like the taste. You can leave it in the fridge for 2 days or 6 months -- it's up to you (or your brother!) This would be lagering and it is usually done at 34-40 degrees.

so should i just leave it around 36 degrees until i'm ready to bottle and then bottle without gradually raising temps in the fridge? This is my first attempt, so as long as it's drinkable i'm happy.... the more drinkable the better though! I'm going to take a reading with my hydrometer the next few days and see if i can move to primary. thanks for any tips and help!
brandon

Cold conditioning can make good beer better. Don't expect it to fix temperature control mistakes.

Yeah just prime and bottle it cold, then let it come up to room temp in the bottles to carbonate.

EDIT: Ah I missed part of your post. Conroe is correct; you aren't going to fix any mistakes with fermentation temps by cold-crashing now. The only thing cold crashing is going to do is improve clarity.

Agree, after the warm ferment the beer's not going to be as clean as it would have been at lager temps, no matter what you do -- I'm just saying you can improve it a little.

Question >>>> If you let it cold crash for a week or more do you need to add a bit of yeast since a lot of it will drop? This is regarding bottling the beer.

I've started to try to crash most of the yeast out and adding a few grams of dry yeast to the bottling bucket. It seems one week at 31F does a good job. There is very little sediment in my bottles and they carb in under a week. Yeast strains like T-58, S-33 and Nottingham make a nice solid sediment. I use T-58. It only leaves a haze that stays there even if I pour out the whole bottle. There is so little in them that even if the sediment gets mixed back up the beer will still pour clear.

Nah, i didn't really think i would fix my temperature problems, just hoping to make the best beer i can at this point. I'm just going to set it and forget it for a while in the fridge.
thanks,
brandon