Another bottle conditioning question

[JonnyO]

I'm sorry if this gets a little wordy, but I know more information = better advice. So here's a quick story of my first homebrew. It's a True Brew Pale Ale kit with LME and DME using Muntons dry yeast. My fermentation was sluggish taking two weeks to get close to desired FG. I don't have a secondary container yet so I went from primary to bottles. At the time of bottling, my gravity reading was 1.015 (desired was 1.010-1012). So I was a little worried that there might still be some fermentable sugars in the beer. I bottled anyway, but reserved a little of the priming sugar (only about 1TBS, probably not enough to make a difference) to try to avoid exploding bottles. I was sort of afraid the bottles would either explode, of the beer would just be flat. After 10 days of conditioning (68-70 degrees) I put one in the fridge and cooled it down for a few hours. Opened it up and was pleasantly surprised. As for the carbonation, it was perfect, nice foamy head, tiny bubbles. Other first impressions....although a pale ale, the beer was more amber in color, which I have since read, is a function of boiling the LME for an hour, carmelization, and all that. It had cleared nicely in the bottles. Taste was pretty good, a little bitter and a bit of a yeasty aftertaste, both of which I hope will mellow out with more conditioning, but definitely drinkable already. Sorry about all the rambling, but here's the main question. Because the beer is very carbonated at this time, I turned the freezer where they are stored (with temperature control) down to about 45 degrees. I know that carbonation shouldn't go any further, but I'm a little afraid that I risk over carbonation if I let it go for the rest of the 3 week conditioning period at 70 degrees. IS THERE ANY ADVERSE EFFECT TO THE BEER (TASTE) THAT CAN BE CAUSED BY CONDITIONING THE BEER AT COLDER TEMPERATURES? Thanks to anyone who actually read this whole thing and gives advice.

 

[cweston]

The only adverse effect of colder temps is that it slows down the conditioning process of your beer. So maybe instead of hitting it's peak a month after carbonation, it's more like 3 months. Since it's your first brew, you're not likely to be too patient about letting it hit it's prime before drinking it, so this may not be a good idea.

The only thing that reallly determines how much your beer will carbonate is how much sugar is available to the yeast. The yeast will eat the sugar and generate CO2 until the sugar is gone. Once the sugar is gone, no more CO2 can be produced.

If your beer fermented for 2 weeks and stabilized at 1.015, I'd say you have nothing to worry about. I'd leave your bottles at room temp and RDWHAHB.

And get busy on that next batch! :cross: