Hello Everyone,
I just put my first batch in a keg a few days ago. Until now, I've been exclusively bottling.
I searched around quite a bit on the forum but couldn't find where anyone answered the specific question I had, which is:
When bottling, I understood and observed myself the importance of letting the beer (most of the time, anyway) condition at room/cellaring temps for at least a few weeks if not more. The beer changed so much during that time, but when I put bottles in the fridge, those seemed to stop changing, or at least changed at a slower or less noticeable rate compared to bottles of that same beer that I left at room temp.
Most people that keg, it seems to me, do not condition at room temp at all, but rather go right from the fermenter to the keg, (with or without cold crashing and/or clearing) and start carbonating, then right to drinking it.
So, I guess my questions boil down to: is there something about force carbonation without priming sugar that makes it not necessary to condition as long? Or does the beer in the keg still condition at serving temps? What makes the two methods (bottling vs kegging) different in terms of requiring time to condition, and doesn't the fact that the beer is cold in the kegging scenario change the way that conditioning happens?
Thanks in advance for any insight into how all of this works.
Dan
I just put my first batch in a keg a few days ago. Until now, I've been exclusively bottling.
I searched around quite a bit on the forum but couldn't find where anyone answered the specific question I had, which is:
When bottling, I understood and observed myself the importance of letting the beer (most of the time, anyway) condition at room/cellaring temps for at least a few weeks if not more. The beer changed so much during that time, but when I put bottles in the fridge, those seemed to stop changing, or at least changed at a slower or less noticeable rate compared to bottles of that same beer that I left at room temp.
Most people that keg, it seems to me, do not condition at room temp at all, but rather go right from the fermenter to the keg, (with or without cold crashing and/or clearing) and start carbonating, then right to drinking it.
So, I guess my questions boil down to: is there something about force carbonation without priming sugar that makes it not necessary to condition as long? Or does the beer in the keg still condition at serving temps? What makes the two methods (bottling vs kegging) different in terms of requiring time to condition, and doesn't the fact that the beer is cold in the kegging scenario change the way that conditioning happens?
Thanks in advance for any insight into how all of this works.
Dan