Lagering in the bottle?

I've followed the usual pattern in the past, ferment, lager, bottle but it took a long time for the bottles to carbonate.

In the real world would there be any noticeable down side to ferment, bottle and the Lager?

I'll ferment following Tasty's schedule, cold crash with finnings at 5°C then lager at -1°C until I get fed up waiting.

Thanks All. Aamcle

Not at all, although you'd want to bottle, carbonate, and then lager

Good, I usually put bottles back in my fermentation fridge to carbonate a normal Pale or Stout takes about a week. I've had lager take three times that although I could have added some more yeast to the bottling bucket to speed it along.

Thanks. Aamcle.

I am doing this to a batch of Marzen that I brewed on 6-4-16. Have 47 bottles at 38° that should be ready now. My first lager and I'm pretty excited!

I do it on my hybrid lagers. Bottle carbonate 3 weeks or maybe more. Then into the fridge for 2-3 weeks.

I'm lagering a koelsch and altbier in the bottle right now.

I think it's a good approach because it enables you to keep the process moving forward by forcing as much of the waiting as possible to the very end of the process. You can do your brew day, ferment for 2 weeks or so, cold crash for a few days, then bottle. After roughly 3 weeks you're effectively done with major "interventions" into the process; from that point on, all you're doing is moving the bottles around. No more racking, no more cleaning, etc. Give the bottles a week or so at room temperature to carb up, then move them to the fridge to lager for as long as it takes them to clear up -- usually 2-4 weeks in my experience.

The only thing about this process is that it requires that you occupy a lot of fridge space with bottles while you lager. Whether this is more or less objectionable than occupying your fermentation chamber is up to you to decide.