Cold Crashing

[BrewMU]

I've seen references to "cold crashing" for beer clarification. Can someone who has had success with this outline the method? When do you do it? Does the beer remain at the lowered temp, or do you let it rewarm for priming and bottling? Is this only suitable with a force carb/keg set-up? Does it work better with certain beers (like ales-v-lagers, etc.)? I'd appreciate any advice, thanks.

 

[SouthBay]

I cold crash most of my ales. I typically wait til it hits final gravity then chill it for a day or two. then rack to abottling bucket. I let it warm back up there before bottling so the coldtemps don't mess up the carbonation

 

[samc]

Get it as cold as you can for at least a day or more, obviously without freezing it. I usually do it after primary ferment is done 10 days or so. If I am dry hopping in the fermenter then that gets done before cold crashing. I mostly keg, but the few bottles I do with the leftover beer carb up just fine. By the time I'm done transferring the 5 gallons into the keg, the leftover few bottles of beer have warmed up into the 40's and I drop a Coopers carbonation tablet into the bottles and seal them up.

I suppose if you left it cold crashing for too long, then all the yeast would eventually fall out and you'd have trouble carbing, but a few days is not an issue.

Make sure to plan for the temperature change by not having a bucket of liquid with a blow off tube hooked up or you might wind up with all that liquid sucked back into your fermenter. I use a piece of open cell foam instead of air lock, but others report that the S type of airlock does not allow suck back into the fermenter.

 

[BrewMU]

Thanks guys. I'll try it with my present batch of Cali Common.