Cold crashing bottled beers/retaining aging.

My apartment is warm. Too warm. 80F in the winter is not at all uncommon even with the heat off and the windows open. Welcome to NYC apartment living.

A result I have a persistent problem of beers overcarbonating. No problem, usually -- when carbonation is right I throw the bottles in the back of the fridge and that stops the process.

But now I've got a big -- 11%ish Belgian tripel that I want to age for an extended period of time. It's got a sharp caramel note on the top that I think will be fantastic if allowed to mellow out. Today it's at absolutely the right level of carbonation for that beer and normally it would be going in the fridge.

Will refrigerating stop the aging process? If so, would removing them from the fridge after putting the yeasties to sleep allow the aging to resume without restarting in-bottle fermentation?

Thanks in advance. I'd love to mellow at least a little of this beer for a full year.

 

if you put it in the fridge the aging will go into slow mo. if you take them back out the yeast will wake up again and continue to carbonate.

on your next brew use less priming sugar and make sure that fermentation is actually over before you bottle.

 

I wouldn't think that temperature would be the cause of overcarbonation - It'd just make the carbonation happen faster. I'd mess with the level of priming sugar you're using.

 

As above, over carbonation is caused by too high a level of fermentable components in the beer prior to bottling. Either incomplete fermentation, too much priming sugar or a combination of the two.

 

Temp has little to do with it, except as others have said in terms of time. The amount of carbonation, the level of it, is purely determined by the amount of fermentables, i.e. sugar present at bottling time, which is consumed by the yeast to provide co2, really nothing else. So if your beer is over carbing, one of 2 things are happening, you are adding too much sugar, or you are getting infections, which are eating the normally unfermentable sugars and producing more co2 than usual.

 

I'm pretty persnickety about not bottling until after I've reached target FG and it's sat there at that level for at least a few days (more usually a week). And I'm down to 1/2 cup sugar or 3/4 DME for most bottlings. The pattern has been that it carbonates at normal speeds (or sometimes even slowly, as in the case of the tripel) but that it just doesn't stop. I always figured that's because it's sitting there at 80F. I know if my primary were at 80F the yeast would go nuts. Could it be something else? I've redoubled sanitation efforts. I'm not at an unusual altitude. I'm keeping things pretty simple -- I'm an extract brewer.

My beers (with one exception that didn't last long enough to get overcarbonated ) haven't tasted infected.

 

Nope, sorry, it really is JUST about the amount of sugar (either fermentable or unfermentable) consumed by the yeast at bottling time. Not yeast, not temp, not time, really.

I posted this yesterday in answer to a question kinda similar to yours...it should give you a rough explanation of how carbing works.