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Cold crashing question
Another option that seems to work well on my bottle conditioned beer is to go ahead and bottle without cold crashing. Give it the proper carbonation/conditioning time at room temps and then crash it in the bottle. This way you get proper carbonation in a more reasonable time and you can still clear the beer. If you store your beer in the fridge for a couple weeks prior to drinking even dry hopped hazy beers will drop the haze. My brew buddy and I split our batches and then try them side by side down the road. He doesn't always crash his beer or store it cold and mine are always cleaner, clearer and stay fresher longer.
ksbrainard wrote:
How fast is fast enough to chill the wort? I have read "use an immersion chiller", but I already do that... do I need to have a prechiller in ice where I cool down the tap water as cold as possible?
I have no idea. I haven't seen any good data on this exactly. But it wouldn't be hard to produce, its just a function of determining the chill rate.
Is a prechiller necessary...probably not but its related to the temp of your chill water certainly.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some correlative value between the amount and types of proteins that crash out during cold break and the different temperatures achieved during the chill process.
The only evidence I have of good cold break leading to less chill haze is my winter brewing. In the winter, when the ground water is very cold, and the ambient air is cold around my kettle, the wort chills in about a third of the time that it takes in the summer (I have yet to implement a prechilling system in summer time, FYI). My winter beers are always clearer than my Summer beers. The haze I have in my beers is chill haze as it goes away as the beer warms up.
So from this stand point, its probably safe to say that the quicker you can get to pitching temps the better it is for the proteins you are trying to get out during cold break.
ksbrainard wrote:
Or is it more in the way that the wort is moved from the kettle to the fermenter? That is, does dumping it though a strainer do a poor job of keeping cold break out of the fermenter?
IMO its mostly temp dependent. But if you are moving all the wort from kettle to fermentor, then some portion of the cold break material likely is getting into the final product and giving you problems. Expecially if you are passing it through a strainer the proteins are jsut getting broken up into smaller pieces again, keeping them in suspension.
To combat this a long time ago I started formulating all my 5 gallon recipes for 6 gallons, so that I could leave 0.5-0.75 gallons or wort behind in the kettle...along with much of that break material.
That's just my take on the matter.
andrew jensen wrote:
Another option that seems to work well on my bottle conditioned beer is to go ahead and bottle without cold crashing. Give it the proper carbonation/conditioning time at room temps and then crash it in the bottle. This way you get proper carbonation in a more reasonable time and you can still clear the beer.
I do the same thing. It's a lot easier to fit a case or two of bottles in the fridge than it is a carboy. Given enough time, all of the bottles will clear.
brewchez wrote:
To combat this a long time ago I started formulating all my 5 gallon recipes for 6 gallons, so that I could leave 0.5-0.75 gallons or wort behind in the kettle...along with much of that break material.
I like that idea. I started bumping up my recipes to 5.5 gallons to make up for lost beer due to racking but adjusting them to 6 gallons makes even more sense to keep that break material in the kettle.
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