I’d really like to avoid any airlock ‘suck back’ or oxygenation when I cold crash in a Better Bottle. Are there any tried and true techniques that will help me avoid those two things?
Can a Better Bottle take the flex from a volume change like that if I were to use a solid stopper?
Thanks!
I wouldn’t trust it to take flex long term. Repeated use might cause a crack and that would be very sad and abusive to beer. But then I doubt the weight of beer pushing against the sides will allow it to flex. The force pushing out will always be more than the inward force from a slight vacuum on top.
Thanks Jimmy. The repeated flexing and possible cracking was my concern too. I think I’ll just use a solid stopper and see what happens. I can go back to the drawing board if the flex is alarming.
I cold crash in my better bottles frequently using a silicone breathable bung. This allows me to reduce the vacuum if I start to get concerned.
The many trick is to crash with as small a head space as possible. This isn’t possible if crashing in primary.
Most of the time I crash jn
The many trick is to crash with as small a head space as possible. This isn’t possible if crashing in primary.
Most of the time I crash in the keg. I do this mainly because I have two beers going at all times and one is always behind the other
Tapatalk is pissing me off.
+1
I’m assuming the first pour out of that keg is murky from settling? Kind of like it is when fining?
Yes. If done right the first pint is cloudy, then pretty much clear after that.
I usually cold crash a couple days in keg, then add gelatin and pump out sediment in a couple more days. I just prefer to avoid the suck back of O2 into the beer altogether. Honestly though, I crashed in fermenters for years and never noted any ill effects. I just feel better about it this way.
Yep. It does suck if you want to bring a keg someplace or need to move it around, but ehh.
in that case you can then jumper from the conditioning keg to a new clean keg and have bright carbonated beer!
+1 Yep.
I do that from time to time, but I hate it. I hate cleaning.
Me too. I only do it if the keg is traveling.
I’d be careful about cold crashing in a closed vessel. I’ve read stories of pro brewers having conditioning tanks collapse in on themselves from sealing it during cold crash. If a steel tank can collapse in on itself I have even less faith that a BB isn’t going to suffer the same fate.
there are scale issues to contend with volume to surface area on a 15 bbl fermenter is very different than in a 5 gallon better bottle. You are only dealing with a few percentage points of shrinkage, which on a small scale isn’t that big a deal.
You do not have to worry about oxidation during cold crashing because yeast cells will be in suspension long after the beer temperature equalizes with the ambient temperature. At that point, you can fill the airlock. Oxidation only becomes a serious threat after beer has been filtered.
I do not cold crash. I just rack to a secondary after 10 to 14 days in the primary and wait for the beer to fall bright if I want non-yeasty beer on the first pint. Cold crashing a primary for a few days does not fix the protein and hop compound precipitation problem.
Thanks for all of the input. Much appreciated.
I wonder at what point suck back becomes an issue? Is this only when you cold crash as opposed to slowly lowering temps or is there a low temp threshold at which this occurs? Or is it a steady gradient of suckage that increases as the temps drop? I have lagered before at around 40F with a bung and airlock in place but I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced suck back? Just curious.