Pressure fermenting vs lagering.

[yankinoz]

I tried to find any side-by-side trials of lagers produced by pressure fermenting and brief conditioning vs fermenting at normal pressures and lagering. No luck. I'm sure major breweries have done it, but most keep their experiments private.

Does anyone know of any?

 

[MHB]

Only thing I can add to the discussion is that Lagering does lots of things.
One of them is "Chill Proofing" the beer.
This involves getting the beer cold enough for temporary chill haze to form and then giving it time to sink to the bottom of the fermenter.
There really is no way to speed this process up, given that the beer is just above freezing point (>-2oC) and Stokes Law applies to how fast trub settles, we are talking 7 days absolute minimum given any sort of rational keg size. Large commercial lagering tanks tend to be horizontal so the trub has less distance to fall, these are generally over 2M in diameter so take around 14 days to drop bright.

Without touching on other maturation effects and how the beer tastes, as mentioned in another thread Kunze is the go to reference for all things lager brewing, not so hot for ale brewers but a worthwhile investment.
Mark