I am making a nut brown ale. It was in the primary for 3 weeks and I was going to bottle condition for 2 weeks before chilling for a week. Do you think I should bottle condition for 3 weeks?
You don't chill TILL you know your beer is finished CARBONATING. So after 3 weeks you chill one for a couple days and then check it...if it's carbed more than likely most it not all of the batch is done....if it's not carbed or even if it is carbed yet doesn't taste "right" then it is still green, so you leave it in the warm temps for another week, then check, if the beer is at the taste you like then they are ready to chill and consume.
If you chill the bottles prematurely, then you will interrupt the carbonation process
and it will take longer to be ready. Because you will put the yeast to sleep before you finish the job.
Guy's one thing you all need to know, and most of us know from experience, is that
you are not in charge of the beer, the yeast is, and they have their own time table. And they've been doing it for millenia, so THEY are the experts not us.
So you shouldn't and can't really impose any kind of time frame on them. You can't really say, "I'm going to move to the next phase ARBITRARILY at such and such time." You can't really have a plan, like you do...You can't just decide your beer is fermented or in this case carbed, by two weeks. You can't wave a magic wand.
It's the same with that silly 1-2-3 rule...you can't and shlouldn't just move the beer willy nilly after one week....that 7 days doesn't factor in the 72 hour lag time that many of us have faced.....If the beer doesn't even begin fermenting til day 3, then if you move the beer out of primary without bothering to take a hydro reading, then more than likely you are interrupting the fermentation process, and MAY get a stuck fermentation.....
In Mr Wizard's colum in BYO while back, he made an interesting analogy about brewing and baking....He said that egg timers are all well and good in the baking process but they only provide a "rule of thumb" as to when something is ready...recipes, oven types, heck even atmospheric conditions, STILL have more bearing on when a cake is ready than the time it says it will be done in the cook book. You STILL have to stick a toothpick in the center and pull it out to see if truly the cake is ready.....otherwise you may end up with a raw cake....
Not too different from our beers....We can have a rough idea when our beer is ready (or use something silly like the 1-2-3 rule (which doesn't factor in things like yeast lag time or even ambient temp during fermentation) and do things to our beer willy nilly....but unless we actually stick "our toothpick" (the hydrometer) in and let it tell us when the yeasties are finished...we too can "f" our beer up.
It's the same with the carbing/conditioning process, as illustrated in what I linked above. If your beer's not carbed or taste funny after three weeks, then
leave it alone for a week or two and check again.
It doesn't mean you did anything wrong, or there's something wrong with your beer...
it's just means it's not ready yet.
I personally don't even bother check on my beers til it's been 3 weeks in the bottle...AND if it's a higher grav beer, or I know the ambient temp in my apartment is below 70 (which it is most of the year except summer) I don't even expect it to be ready by then...
If you really want to have a higher odds that the beer you grab is ready when you open it? Don't touch one for 6 weeks.....But who among us wants to wait THAT long? I know I can't...But if it is an average grav beer, more than likely it is going to be ready at 3, that's why that is a "rule of thumb," but a rule of thumb is not set in stone.....
Like I have said all over this place, I have had stouts and porters that weren't ready for anywhere between 4 and 8 weeks, and had a 1.090 Belgian that took
three months to carb up and still tasted like crap for 6 months, and at 8 months it STILL has an alcohol bite to it.
I can't say this enough,
you are not making koolaid, gang, you are working with living creatures who have their OWN agendas and timeframes, despite what yours MIGHT be.