Keg and ale pail - frozen solid!!!

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ghpeel

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Well I was cleaning out my chest freezer keg holder the other night, and I pulled out the temperature probe AND FORGOT TO PUT IT BACK IN.

In that freezer I had 1 full keg (German blonde ale), 2 empty kegs, and an ale pail of hefeweizen that I was cold crashing!

I noticed this 3 days later, and by then everything was frozen solid. I mean SOLID. I let everything thaw out and now I'm about to keg the de-frozen hefe. I've got no idea what effect this will have on the finished beer. I do know that the kegs seem fine (they are holding pressure) and the ale pail didn't crack or leak.

I'll report back in a few days after some sampled are carbed and tasted.
 
Beer is carbed up and sampled. It's seems perfectly fine! It's my first straight hefeweizen and I think it hits the style perfectly. So I guess the freezing didn't impact the beer at all. Good to know!
 
Beer is carbed up and sampled. It's seems perfectly fine! It's my first straight hefeweizen and I think it hits the style perfectly. So I guess the freezing didn't impact the beer at all. Good to know!

Yeah, it's good to know!

That's awesome! This is probably a common homebrewing misconception that you have just cleared up.
 
Think....BMC "Ice".

The process of "icing" beer involves lowering the temperature of a batch of beer until ice crystals form. Since alcohol has a lower freezing point than water and doesn't form crystals, when the ice is filtered off, the alcohol concentration increases. The process is known as "fractional freezing."

Yum.
 
IMO, the beer usually benefits from the freezing so long as the ferment has finished out. I often deliberately let mine form some ice when cold conditioning and it seems to accelerate clearing. I have not let the beer freeze completely solid as you did, but once thawed, I don't think it will matter. How was the clarity? I would bet that it was brilliantly clear. Probably nice and crisp as well.
 
you are lucky your full keg survived the freezing. a frozen keg can split at the seam as the ice expands.

It sure can. I've seen freezing water split open a steel pipe fence post that was not capped. Rain water got in and filled the pipe and it split at the first hard freeze.
 
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