Length of cold crash?

I finally upgraded and now have the ability to cold Crash. Just wondering how long most of you all Crash for ales?

I do 3-4 days at 34 F.

While others probably cold crash in the FV, my goal is to close transfer from FV to a keg just before completion. I try to spund allowing fermentation to complete at room temp, then cold crash under CO2 head pressure.

I use an old side-by-side fridge to cold crash one keg in the freezer side temp controlled at 32*F and serve from two kegs in the fridge side. The kegged beer remains in the cold side until I need it which is routinely 2-3 weeks.  Incidentally, it’s the same process for lagers.

I am considering adding a 4th keg to my pipeline which will lengthen the cold conditioning to 4-6 weeks. Sometimes, the 2-3 weeks isn’t enough to clarify the way I like even with floating dip tubes. This additional time will lower the stress I put on myself to get clear beer into the glass.

Hope this helps.

I could crash anywhere from 3 days to several weeks.  The schedule depends on how the beer reacts.

Yep. The beer’s ready whenever the beer’s ready.

Usually 3 to 4 days at ~30, if it hasn’t cleared up by then I just go ahead and bottle it anyway, but that usually isn’t the case. I suppose if drinking a less than perfectly clear beer really bothered me - which it doesn’t - I could always turn out the lights and imbibe in the dark. I think sometimes we can get a bit too focused on the visual results, when beer - for me at least - really should be about what my mouth thinks of the experience.

Is there any reason to slowly decrease the temperature (Like 10° a day) to cold Crash temperature with an ale.?  I read that people do that for lagers.

Nope, no need.  That’s why its called a crash! Sometimes the temp is slowly lowered for lagers, but that’s if the yeast is still active.  When you crash it’s post fermentation so there’s no need for that.

I don’t even find it necessary to go slow for lagers with still active yeast, depending somewhat on the strain.  As Denny often says, there’s theory and then there’s practice!

Crash pretty much as fast as you can, but realize that the vacuum created by the drop in temperature in a sealed vessel needs to be accounted for and CO2 applied to equalize that - and as to blow off tubes/airlocks on unsealed vessels, you will get suck back on them.  Pretty much a given and most of us provide for CO2 to avoid that, but just thought I should mention it for “clarification” (pun intended).

I agree completely on the lack of need for slow crash.  I should have pointed out that I was repeating the rationale of those who do it.

I have two holes in the (4-inch) cap for my fermenter. The first one has an airlock. The second one starts with a stopper in it, but after fermentation has been going long enough that I feel that all the air has been blown out of the headspace, I put in a piece of stainless tubing connected to a standard “Happy Birthday” mylar baloon. When the balloon is full of CO2 and generates some backpressure the airlock begins bubbling again. When I cold crash the balloon provides more than enough gas to keep anything else from getting sucked back in. Why buy CO2 when you are already making it?

Everyone’s different. I like clear beer when I can get it.

I just put a stopper in the airlock hole, my FV’s seal up well enough to hold the small amount of vacuum created by crashing. I remove the FV from the fridge the day before bottling and let it warm back up to room temperature, presto chango vacuum gone.
  And I prefer clear beer too Tommy, I just don’t get all worked up and bummed down when it doesn’t happen. That being said I’ll admit that I have tinkered a bit with my Red Ale recipe for the sole purpose of getting the Red right. Guess that makes me a hypocrite, oh well.

My PET carboy holds pressure fine with a stopper in place of the airlock, but the sides buckle in under the negative pressure. After seeing that happen a couple of times I became concerned that the buckling and cold temps could make it brittle and that it would eventually crack.

When I cold crash my beers,  I first do a room tempertture closed transfer to the keg like Brewbama does, put the keg in my lagering freezer set at 33 degrees, put 10 lbs of CO2 pressure on it, and let it sit for w week or so.  If I want to drink the beer a bit sooner, I increase the pressure to 15 lbs and it’s done in about 3 days.  That way I don’t get any “suck back” as the beer cools in the lagering freezer.

If the beer is something like a Saison, I put more pressure on it to make it effervescent and play the draft line game to eliminate foaming when it is poured.  There are some good carbonation charts in thee literature that will give you insight on how many volumes the beer will absorb at specified temperatures.

Just my .02

Richard, this is a great execution of a popular but often flawed technique to maintain a closed environment.  I often see references to balloons attached to fermenters with silicone tubing, which rather defeats the purpose as it is about as oxygen permeable a material as one could find (vinyl is not a great deal better in this regard.)  On another forum I saw a long thread where people were mulling over ways to wrap the tubing in something to provide an oxygen barrier, or find some other less permeable plastic or PTFE type tubing.  Stainless is such a simple, cheap, and obvious choice!

(But I bet your local party store could provide a mylar balloon bearing a more appropriate theme than “happy birthday.”  Surely some beer mug graphics or the like?)

The piece of stainless I used was especially cheap because it was a scrap left over from a different project, so essentially free. It also fits in the same size hole as my airlock, which is convenient.

As far as the balloon, I used a sharpie to change it to “Hoppy Birthday”.

How necessary is the CO2 replacement when cold-crashing?

I like the way cold-crashing compacts the trub which allows me to extract more sediment free beer into the bottling bucket.  Since I don’t have a CO2 tank so I just replace the airlock with a starsan soaked paper towel and drop the temp on my chest freezer to 34 F.  How much might the O2 introduced into the head space affect my beer?  I generally make pretty good beer but I wonder whether this may be contributing to those less satisfying beers.