Only sort of what I meant actually.
There is the polyphenol complexing which is probably one of the big ones and a number of other things, most of which ARE beneficial, because the bad stuff happens when beer is warm, not cold. They dont constitute giant changes in the beer, but they ARE most of what makes the difference between a beer thats been well cold conditioned and a beer which has not. They aren't hard to research, I managed, I'll let you manage for yourself.
But first - ask yourself a question. Why is it do you think that you lager a beer for a long time in the cold? If it were all about yeast... wouldn't you store your beer at a nice warm temperature to let it do its work in conditions it actually likes?? Oh.. wait, people do do that. Its called warm conditioning and its what you do if all you are after is the benefits that time in contact with yeast can provide. Cold conditioning is about.... wait for it.... cold! and time spent in it. Not about yeast. The traditional drawn out Lagering process that labels is so fond of, is a combination of the two things - a long slow run down from fermentation temperatures that maintains yeast activity for quite a while, substituting time for warmth to get the same sort of levels of total yeast activity as warm conditioning. And then things get too cold and the yeast stop working (yeah yeah, they retail micro levels of activity... blah blah. They do virtually nothing instead of actually nothing) its then that the stuff that happens in the cold happens.
The point is, that there are two sets of things going on and one is not dependant on the other. Once the yeast has done its job... its job is done. Whether it did it warm or cold, fast or slow... show's over for Mr Yeastie and he can go home. Now you decide whether to cold condition the beer, and change it some more and whether you have removed the yeast will make pretty much no difference - aside from the fact that they way you are likely to have removed the yeast, ie with a Filter, in and of itself does a decent proportion of what you would achieve by cold conditioning in the first place, so you get to knock some time out of the equation (less so with a seiving filter like a 1micron pleated than with active depth filtration like a DE filter... but still a reasonable amount)
Now - none of that means that I'm saying the way labels brews his beer is wrong - or that lagering on (some) yeast is bad. It plainly isn't. Traditional lagering is wonderful and if you have the time and patience to do it, then you are managing things in a way that is at the very least, equal to any other practice. It so happens that although the things I "know" from my brewing study tell me that traditionally lagered beer shouldn't be any better than beer thats managed in other ways.... my gut feel is that its still the "best" way to do it. My own brewing isn't good enough to show up the differnence though, hopefully one day it will be.
In the meantime - I "know" both theoretically and practically. That if you give the yeast a chance to do its job (warm, cold, fast, slow - whatever) then filter it out with a 1 micron filter. The beer is good immediately, but in general and especialy for lagers and lager like beers, it will improve over a few weeks as it spends time in the cold.
So - going back to the OP - who's question is after all what we are trying to address is it not? He's making a Kolsch. A beer that is supposed to be free of the flaws yeast can clear up (mainly D and Acetaldhyde) AND is supposed to posess the lager like qualities that you get from a beer which has spent time in the cold. He filtered his beer - probably too early - what can he expect?
Well - If he took it away from the yeast too too early. He's boned. It'll probably always be a bit green and not right. Might get a bit better, might not. Sure it will stilldo all the "cold" things, but they're subtle and certainly not enough to save it from overt greeness.
However, if the yeast had done most of its work.... then filtering it will probably have helped. It will have done much of the sedimentation work that ccing does and then the rest can be done by actually getting, it into the cold for as long and as cold as possible, so there is still a chance for the beer to improve - especially given that as we discussed, there actually will be some yeast in there anyway.
He sticks aother week or so of main fermentation into that process.... and there is nothing bad about it at all.
