I have made a breakfast Stout. From what I have read, these take some time for the flavors to come together. My question is about the best temperature to do this. Should I keep the bottles at room temp (68 - 71 F), basement temp (61 - 66 F), garage temp (now 50 - 54 F), or beer fridge temp which is 32 F?
The chemical reactions responsible for beer ‘mellowing’, loss of hop flavor/aroma/bitterness, and beer staling happen faster at warm temperatures. The physical process of fine particulates settling out of the beer happen best at cold temperatures. Any of those temperatures would work, it will just favor one or the other. I like to do a period of warm conditioning (usually in the fermenter) before packaging and lagering, but that’s just me. Once you like the flavor you should keep it as cold as you can if you plan to keep it around for a very long time. Before I got into kegging I would just leave all the beer in the 65-75° closet, and some of them started to show evidence of staling (slight cardboard flavor) at around the 6 month mark.
Once it’s carbonated, I’d put them out in the garage or keep them in the (45-55F) range for the reasons nyakavt mentioned. Just my 2-cents! 