Cold Crashing vs. aging

[AaronMu]

Hi fellow Homebrewers. I recently bought a kegging system about 3 months ago, and heard that Cold crashing speeds up the settling/aging process. Does Cold crashing effect the taste? I guess my question is...Can cold crashing right after fermentaion is complete, save a few weeks of settling in, and still produce the same quality taste??
Any comments are appreciated.

 

[Aleman]

Cold crashing when fermentation is complete just helps settle out any stubborn less flocculant yeast, it doesn't really serve any other purpose

 

[luckyeddie]

Totally agree with Aleman - chilling is no substitute for ageing.

Occasionally you will get the odd beer which just sits there all semi-translucently laughing at you, resisting all attempts to drop it bright. I fully expect to have to do it with LE's AG#20 (the chocolate vanilla beer I brewed last week) because I forgot the protofloc / Irish Moss treatment in between the rain storms. It'll get a couple of weeks at near freezing point then I'll let it warm up, prime and bottle.

Whenever I crash-chill/lager, I always re-pitch a little of the primary yeast when bottling (one teaspoonful of yeast slurry and 100g of brewing sugar in the bottling keg to 20 litres of beer is about right, I find). Afterwards, I'll still try to keep my grubby mitts off the beer for at least a month (yeah right, Like I've EVER been able to resist having a sneaky one for more than a fortnight).

 

[unclepumble]

Cold crashing when fermentation is complete just helps settle out any stubborn less flocculant yeast, it doesn't really serve any other purpose

Not strictly true Tony, if you are set up for high quality filtering etc crash cooling and cold conditioning for a couple of days before filtering at near to 0deg as possible does serve the purpose of exposing any chill hazes and causes them to form, that way the benefit is that you can filter out any chill haze along with any residual yeasts.

However saying that not many homebrewers have systems with that level of complexity so you are mostly correct.

UP

 

[jamesb]

to interject, crash cool and add aux finings to floc the chill haze **** together and out is good. that doesn't however, help with the OP's quest of quick conditioning. that's not going to happen.

did start me thinking about the thread about 'freezing' wine to help it's conditioning though. but it's different processes than beer, and from having muchos frozen beer last winter, I can say it doesn't make one bit of difference. beer conditioning takes time. even the big boys can't get away with it.