Cold Conditioning Ales

[thatguy314]

I'm brewing a cream ale right now. I wanted to cold condition it after fermentation is over. I know this is often done for kolsch.

For an ale yeast, how cold do I condition?
What's a good length of time?
Do I need to add fresh yeast before cold conditioning?
Does it make a difference if I condition after 1' or do I need to do a 2' first?

[Chupa LaHomebrew]

Do you keg? If so just rack to keg when it's fully fermented and drop the temp to around 40 for as long as you want. You can do it at the same time as carbonating.

If you bottle you probably would want to rack to secondary and then cold condition for a couple weeks before bottling.

[Dirk McLargeHuge]

Do you keg? If so just rack to keg when it's fully fermented and drop the temp to around 40 for as long as you want. You can do it at the same time as carbonating.

If you bottle you probably would want to rack to secondary and then cold condition for a couple weeks before bottling.

+1. I cold condition in kegs before bottling.

[DiscoFetus]

I know you can't bottle condition well at this cold of a temp...once in bottles would you return to a warmer temp? I'm about to do a lager and kolsch and curious about this.

[Chris_J]

It's only if you're naturally carbonating that you'll need to warm up the beer. Otherwise force-carbonate cold.

[BDawg]

Make sure you are fully attenuated before cold conditioning. Apple-y flavorerd light beers just don't do it for me.

Here's my ale cold conditioning regimen:

Give it at least 2 weeks in the primary and check gravity before racking to a secondary (which is more correctly called a brite tank in this case).
Give it another week or so at warm temps in the secondary, then put it in the kegerator to cool.
Cool it down to 40F and let it sit for its lagering period, which depends on the size of the beer. A 1.048 cream ale would be about 3 weeks.
(I kinda loosely use a week per every 1.015 pts OG). The last week of that time period I'd crash it all the way down to 29F to flock all the yeast out.

Be careful of suck-back through your airlock when crash cooling, especially the 3 piece ones.
Use vodka instead of other sanitizers so that if it does suck back, you won't be afraid to drink your beer anyway.

HTH-

[BigNastyBrew]

Give it at least 2 weeks in the primary and check gravity before racking to a secondary (which is more correctly called a brite tank in this case).

Would you do this for a hefe too? Or do you have a shorter schedule?

[bcmaui]

Give it at least 2 weeks in the primary and check gravity before racking to a secondary (which is more correctly called a brite tank in this case).

Is it a brite tank because you transfer out of that to a third vessel after that? Or is your brite tank also the final serving tank with a shorter dip tube?