I know there is some debate on if you need to compensate for headspace C02 being absorbed into the beer after cold crashing. Has anyone done this or do you just use room temperature calculations for priming sugar?
I will be bottling tomorrow and I will have cold crashed for 3 days around 35F. According to brewers friend, If i enter 35F as my temp it literally cuts the amount of priming sugar in half. That’s a huge difference.
Anyone have any experience with this?
I’ve always wondered about what temp to enter into priming calculators. Is it the highest temp the beer reached? Is it the temp of the beer at bottling? I’ve found threads where people much smarter than me get into arguing about why this or that should theoretically happen but in reality I think there are too many variables. I’ve only cold crashed a beer once. If I remember correctly I let it warm back up primed like normal and it came out fine.
I may just pull it out of the my chest freezer today and let it get closer to room temp so I don’t have to worry about it.
I’ve always figured that you need to calculate the amount of priming sugar to what the temp of the beer will be at during carbonation. Cold crashing shouldn’t make any difference. The beer will warm up and the yeast will wake up and eat what they can.
Well I think the idea is that the C02 in the headspace of the fermenter could have been absorbed by the beer so when you bottle it, so there would already be some C02 in the beer so the idea is you compensate for that. I just took a sample and at 35 degrees there certainly wasn’t any carbonation in it at all.
The temp of the beer during carbonation really only affects how fast the yeast burns through the sugar. The amount of C02 produced should remain constant regardless of the temp it carbs at (with the exception of extreme temps that tire or kill your yeast)
Use the highest temp that the beer reached during active fermentation. If you primaried at 64F, raised to 68F to finish, then cold-crashed, use 68F.
