Cc'ing Time!

[BarneyG]

Hey Fella's, How long can you CC for? <_< Or maybe I should be asking is there a time limit? :blink:

My wheat beer has been CC'ing for 2-3 months now, I'm just wondering how much taste if any would get effected by this amount of time!

 

[Hoops]

Barney

I have CC'd for about 5 months once (not by choice but due to work committments)
It was one of my best beers ever. I was worried about autolysis etc etc but I was impressed with the outcome.
I fermented in the primary, then racked to the secondary, and once it had fully fermented I dropped the fermenting fridge down to around 2-3C and that's where it stayed for half the year.
I don't think your beer will be any worse off for it, probably even better off.

Hoops

 

[Jovial_Monk]

have a 10% doppelbock been in secondary in lagering fridge nearly 5 months

bigger the beer, longer the cc'ing
if it is a lager, cc colder & longer

wheatbeers, hefeweizens are bottled after 7 days primary, here, you WANT the yeast. weizinebocks can be aged a bit longer

Jovial Monk

 

[BarneyG]

Cheers fella's :chug:

I can only assume that when priming, you let the wort come back up to room temp! h34r:

 

[Murray]

Cheers fella's :chug:

I can only assume that when priming, you let the wort come back up to room temp! h34r:

Not necessarily, but the temperature must be taken into acount when calculating priming sugar/malt.

 

[RobW]

I've read that you can get off flavours & gradual oxygen permeation from ccing in plastic containers over long periods. Glass seems to be the recommendation if you can. Haven't gone longer than 8 weeks myself so I can't really say one way or the other.

 

[PostModern]

I'd agree with the JM here. Wheat beers (with a weizen yeast) should be bottled/kegged right at the end of primary.

And Murray, the temp to consider for priming calculations is the highest temperature the beer experienced when fermention completed, or after fermentation completed. We know that beer holds more CO2 at lower temps, but if the beer fermented at say 20C, it'll be holding as much CO2 as will dissolve in beer at that temp. Lowering the temperature to 0C won't suddenly make it contain more CO2 unless the beer is still fermenting and producing CO2. Conversely, if the brew is fermented at say 10C then stored at 20C, the difference of CO2 will be released from the beer (as it can't maintain the level of CO2 saturation when the temp rises), so 20C should be the temp you base the calculations on.

And to muddy the situation further if the beer fermented at 10C, then for a while at say 16, then back down to 10 before fermentation completed, you'd still go off 10 as more CO2 would have been produced at this temperature that the beer could still hold.

From that, we should use the temperature of the diacetyl rest for calculating dissolved CO2 for lagers, but I'm not sure if the relatively short time at that temperature would release ~all~ of the CO2.

Experience anyone?

 

[RobW]

When I started ccing the first couple of brews were overcarbonated. Not a huge amount but enough that you couldn't pour a glass without about 3 inches of head. I started using a table from Grumpy's website to adjust for temperature & that was OK. Now I just pull the drum out of cc a day or so before I want to bottle & let it come to room temp.
I think you'll also find that even in cc you still get some CO2 production as the yeast starts to chew into longer chain sugars that weren't used up in the initial ferment. I've noticed that beers which are undercarbonated initially will get a bit more fizz if you leave them for an extended period and that may be the reason why. Others have said similiar things here before (Deebee?). I may be barking up the wrong tree but that's how it seems to me.