Cold Crashing Question

[Fritobandito]

I'm going to be bottling an amber ale within a week or so, and was going to try cold crashing for the first time. I've got my converted mini fridge in my basement where I could set the temp to wherever I want. My question is : if I cold crash in my basement and then move the beer upstairs afterwords will the movement just shake everything back into the beer, or will it all settle out again? Am I better off just skipping the cold crash?

 

[Newbeerguy]

I'm going to be bottling an amber ale within a week or so, and was going to try cold crashing for the first time. I've got my converted mini fridge in my basement where I could set the temp to wherever I want. My question is : if I cold crash in my basement and then move the beer upstairs afterwords will the movement just shake everything back into the beer, or will it all settle out again? Am I better off just skipping the cold crash?

I guess it depends on how you move it back upstairs. If you crash it for a week, the yeast cake with compact and if your a gentle with it when you move it, you won't stir up too much. I'd move it an hour or 2 before you plan to bottle so that anything that did get stired up settles out again.

 

[flabyboy]

Anyway you can just bottle from you cold crash location?

 

[Justibone]

You can cold crash it downstairs, and after that's done rack it to a "bright tank" (another bucket) for 24-72 hours to let the strays settle out. Then rack it to a bottling bucket and go from there.

An extra racking step does introduce the risk of more oxygen to the beer, unless you can do it under CO2 pressure with a kegging setup, of course. If you are bottle-conditioning, though, there's going to be yeast in the bottom anyways so I never saw the point of cold crashing at all.

 

[krisagon]

This never occurred to me, but you don't want to cold crash in a glass carboy, right?
Since the fridge temperatures would be bad for the glass?

Plastic or stainless would be the way to go, I guess.

 

[RLinNH]

This never occurred to me, but you don't want to cold crash in a glass carboy, right?
Since the fridge temperatures would be bad for the glass?

Plastic or stainless would be the way to go, I guess.

Wrong. The cold will not affect the glass of a carboy. It's hot water that will crack a carboy, not cold.


OP, I also Cold Crash in the basement, then I have to carry the carboys upstairs and into the kitchen for kegging. Just move the carboys without them touching your torso, and walk gently. Give them about an hour to let them settle, and you'll be fine.

 

[Fritobandito]

Sounds good, thanks for the advice everyone.

 

[h22lude]

You can cold crash it downstairs, and after that's done rack it to a "bright tank" (another bucket) for 24-72 hours to let the strays settle out. Then rack it to a bottling bucket and go from there.

An extra racking step does introduce the risk of more oxygen to the beer, unless you can do it under CO2 pressure with a kegging setup, of course. If you are bottle-conditioning, though, there's going to be yeast in the bottom anyways so I never saw the point of cold crashing at all.

Semi bringing this back from the dead (it was last year )

Bottle conditioning does leave a very small yeast cake at the bottom which is hard to avoid but wouldn't cold crashing get some of the other trub out of the bottles so your beer would be clearer when you pour it into a glass?

 

[Justibone]

I've always found that if I did a secondary rack at all, the other trub (non-yeast) would already be gone. There is a principle, not sure how accurate it is, but it sounds accurate: getting the last 10% cleaned up takes as much effort as the first 90%. So maybe racking it once gets off 90% of the trub, then again is 90% of that (9%), then so on and so on.

I don't worry about clear beers much anyways, because I like wheat beers, but if you do then you can rack as many times as you like. If you are doing BIAB you'll have a lot more trub, so maybe you want to get rid of that, but there are definitely diminishing returns on multiple iterations of racking beer.