Bottling after cold crash

[creepyjackalope]

Good morning
Gonna be bottling batch #2 today. (a Saison that I dry hopped with Citra) It's sitting in the garage fridge cold crashing right now. Wondering whether or not to allow it to come to room temp before bottling or go ahead and bottle it while it's cold. I've seen conflicting information on this. The priming sugar calculator I used even had temperature as a variable. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Math0]

You should check this one:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f14/cold-crash-before-bottling-247927/

 

[MrHadack]

You can bottle it when it is cold. But the temperature you enter into the sugar calculator IS NOT the current temperature of the beer (even though the calculator sometimes asks for that.) I know this is confusing, but I will explain.

CO2 gets dissolved into the beer during fermentation. It doesn't all escape out of the airlock. So the priming sugar calculator is trying to estimate how much CO2 is still dissolved in the beer so that you don't end up over-carbonating.

However, as a beer warms up, more CO2 leaves the beer. So what you really need to know is a ballpark estimate of how warm your beer was when it was finished fermentation. Let's say, for example, it was finished fermentation and it was resting in a room with a temperature of 68F. Then you cold crashed it, and now you're bottling. You should enter "68F" as your temperature in the priming calculator. CO2 doesn't enter the beer during the cold crash, it only leaves the beer when it was warm. So the beer's CO2 level will remain the same as it was when it was 68F.

If this isn't clear, let me know and I will try to explain further.

 

[sweetcell]

you can bottle cold. i never let my cold-crashed beer warm up again, i always bottle cold. never caused an issue.

for the priming calculator, use the max temp of fermentation, not current temp (i.e. near freezing). those calculators don't take into account cold-crashing, they assume you are bottling at fermentation temps. so if you pitched at 66*F and the beer finished at 70*F, you'd use 70*F as your temp in the calculator. if you stayed steady at 66*F, use 66.

 

[creepyjackalope]

Thanks guys. My bottles are sanitizing right now. I'll wait to pull the carboy out of the fridge until I'm ready to rack to my bottling bucket.