Bottle Carbing Question re: temps

I had a beer that I fermented at about 65 degrees, then transfered to secondary and dry-hopped for a week and then crash cooled for a week at 36 or so degrees for clarification etc.

When doing bottle conditioning / carbonation calculations, so I use 65 degrees or 36 degrees? I assume since the fermentation and CO2 was put into solution occured at 65 degrees I would use that, as the yeast was probably doing nothing when it was at 36 degrees with regard to producing CO2.

Thanks,
Paul

First off...Welcome to the forums

Congrats on your hypothesis, not many brewers get this. It is the temperature of your ferment for calculating dissolved CO2. That is when the CO2 is being produced in abundance, and the cold temperature allows more to remain in solution. The one caveat is that when you warm it, guess what...more comes out if you have not restricted it (i.e. capped or kegged...although it can only go back into solution if you cool it down, at least this is how I understand it). That all being said, I normally err on the side of caution by using the ferment temp...and I tend to carbonate my beer at ferment temps.

Cool,

Thats what I thought, thanks.

I looked back at some notes, and the batch I did about a month ago, I bottled cold too, and it worked fine!

I think the carboy was at about 36 when I took it out of the fridge. I was still getting condensation on the sides of the bottles as I filled and capped them so I imagine the beer was still below 45 or 50 when they were capped.

Great info around here by the way.

-Paul

You can get away with colder-than-ferment (quite a bit colder) carbonation, but I have found it can take much much longer. My rule of thumb now, is that I prime, bottle/keg and leave @ ferment temp for app. 2 weeks and then straight into cold storage.

Oh yeah, well, now that they are capped, they are sitting in a 70 degree bathroom.

I may have few posts, but at least now I have more brews under my belt than posts.

I find that aboug 10 days at 70F will get most beers carbed pretty quick. Though this is a 1.096 Monster. I probably want it to 'mature' a little though, so try a few to see if it gets carbed, then forget about the other 45 of them.

-Paul

Sounds like a good plan