Priming After Cold Crashing

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TyHadaway

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I just need a bit of clarity on the cold crashing process. Firstly, what is an optimum temperature for cold crashing and does that change according to styles? Secondly, when priming for bottling after cold crashing, do you prime from the cold crashing temperature or do you rather bring it back up to fermenting temperature and what would be the reason for that?

Never cold crashed before, so this will be a first for me.
 
Bring the beer down close to freezing. I cold crash at 33F for about 2 days before bottling. I use the same temp for all beers (except Hefeweizen, which does not get crashed). There is no need to bring the temp back up before adding priming sugar and bottling. Once it gets back to temp in the bottles, the yeast will do it's job. I have read that it can take longer to bottle carbonate after cold crashing due to less yeast in solution, and the fact that it does have to come to temp after bottling, but I have found that all of my beers have carbonated in the same amount of time whether cold crashed or not.
 
Erik describes the cold crashing process well. Just to reinforce, no, you don't have to warm it up to bottle. Priming calculators take into account the amount CO2 already in the beer when they calculate the total CO2 for carbonation. You base the amount of priming sugar on the warmest temperature post-fermentation. So if you fermented at 64F and then raised it to 68F to finish up and reach FG and then let it sit for a while longer at 64F and THEN cold crashed, you would prime based on 68F regardless of the temp at bottling time.

This is because fully fermented beer will off-gas CO2 as it warms. As long as fermentation has finished (i.e. FG is reached), when the beer is cooled it will not regain any of the CO2 that was off-gassed or create any new CO2 by fermentation.

Now just to be clear, if we use the same scenario (64->68->64->33) but you didn't reach FG until a few days after you dropped back to 64F, you would use 64F as your temp for the priming calculator. It's all about the highest temp after fermentation stops.
 
I have found that you if you don't have dedicated freezers to get down to 32f then you can still get very clear beer by simply making it as cold as you can. I get great results crashing to approx 40f in a fridge, but before that I was cold crashing to 45-50f in a swamp cooler loaded with frozen water bottles swapping them twice a day.

Seems kinda warm but I found that it cleared the beer up a lot, then throw in some gelatin for good measure.
 
After reading up on this I decided that I needed to calculate the needed amount of priming sugar using the temperature that the beer is at before bottling. I cold crashed my beer at 37 degrees for a week and bottled at that temp. The picture was taken after 3 days in bottles.
IMG_2580.jpg
 
After reading up on this I decided that I needed to calculate the needed amount of priming sugar using the temperature that the beer is at before bottling. I cold crashed my beer at 37 degrees for a week and bottled at that temp. The picture was taken after 3 days in bottles. View attachment 546729

Sorry for rebooting an old thread. Did you add new yeast after cold crashing for 7 days?
 
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