BrauKaiser said:Because the yeast has been inactive for such a long time and only little yeast is in suspension anyway, it is recommended to add fresh yeast at bottling time to ensure consistent carbonation in a reasonable time frame. The fresh yeast can come from either dry yeast (1/4 pack should be enough), yeast sediment from the primary fermenter of another batch or Kraeusen. The type of yeast doesn't matter much since the flavor has already been defined during the fermentation and lagering process. Any clean well flocculating ale or lager yeast will do.
I'm curious about this too. John Palmer's book says many microbreweries and brewpubs lager their beer right before bottling for the sake of clarity. I assume if you cooled the beer for 24-48 hours before bottling, then stored the bottles at normal ale fermentation temps for about 2 weeks, that should work fine. Warming it up just before bottling doesn't really make a lot of sense to me - seems like it could get some of those precipitated solids back into solution.
Comments?
Thanks.
p.s. How's the weather up there? My folks in Kincheloe said it got down to -20 last night, but I suspect tonight will be even colder.
The reason for the warm up is simple- cold fluids "hold" more co2. When you take a sample of the beer for an SG reading, if it's in the 30s, it's almost like it's already carbonated. Looking at a carbonation chart, you would even decrease the amount of priming sugar, since the beer is already semi-carbed up. If you bottle that directly, you can do that if you decrease the primary sugar according to the chart. If you just bottle it with the traditional amount of priming sugar while the beer is cold, and let it warm up to carbonate, you would have overcarbonated beer (at best) or bottle bombs at worst.
BYO said:"Keep in mind that, if your beer warms up after fermentation, it will lose CO2. This will not happen instantaneously, though. However, lowering your beers temperature will not increase the level of CO2, unless a source of CO2 is present. (Continuing fermentation or CO2 from an outside source like CO2 cylinder are the two most likely possibilities.)"
I have to disagree, lowering the temp after final gravity will not increase the CO2. Raising the temp will decrease it slowly. The fermentation temp is what matters most with residual CO2.
Figure 65- Nomograph for determining more precise amounts of priming sugar. To use the nomograph, draw a line from the temperature of your beer through the Volumes of CO2 that you want, to the scale for sugar. The intersection of your line and the sugar scale gives the weight of either corn or cane sugar in ounces to be added to five gallons of beer to achieve the desired carbonation level. Here is a list of typical volumes of CO2 for various beer styles:
British ales 1.5-2.0
Porter, Stout 1.7-2.3
Belgian ales 1.9-2.4
American ales 2.2-2.7
European lagers 2.2-2.7
Belgian Lambic 2.4-2.8
American wheat 2.7-3.3
German wheat 3.3-4.5
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