Cold Conditioning Questions

[bigolbigbelly]

A friend of mine just donated a old fridge to me for brewing. I a bit low on funds right now so I cannot buy a fridge temperature controller yet. So starting on lagers seem out of the picture for now since the highest I can get the fridge is about 46º-48º. From what I have read this is too low temp for primary frementation on a lager. So I wanted to start cold conditioning some of my ales. I do not keg yet (In future plans but low on funds).
My questions are:
Is it best to cold condition in the secondary or after bottling?
If in the secondary, will I need to add more yeast before bottling?
Should my process be:
primary until 3/4 to FG then cold condition
-or-
should it go into the secondary for a couple of weeks, then cold condition?
How long is a good amount of time for cold conditioning?

I have searched forums and checked the online version of how to brew but have not been able to find the answers. Any help you could give is appreciated.

Joe

 

[mithion]

For ales, I wouldn't bother cold condition in the secondary. Ale yeast doesn't play well with cold and it will simply drop out of your beer. You need to keep it active so it can clean up after itself. With that said, if you decided to cold condition anyway, I'd repitch before bottling just to be on the safe side. As for a time frame, I've read that you shouldn't bother cold conditioning if your gonna do it for less than 3 weeks. So I would set that as the minimum time. So probably a month or two should do that trick. Anyhow, that's my $0.02.

 

[Yooper]

My feeling is that you can cold condition in the primary a bit, or in the secondary, without any loss of carbonation once bottled. There are still plenty of yeast in suspension. I've even made some lagers with 6 weeks at 34 degrees, and they carbed up fine (albeit a bit more slowly) in the bottle.

Cold crashing the beer before bottling can help clear it up and smooth out some of the flavors.