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This year my goal is to improve the clarity of my bottle conditioned beer.

I intend to do this by:

  1. At the end of the fermentation, adding finings (Isinglass) to the brew barrel, followed by;
  2. Putting my brew barrel in the fridge for 2 days.

Should I be concerned that this will be too effective and remove all the yeast from the beer, thereby resulting in under carbonated or even flat beer? Or will I just need to leave the bottled beer a little longer at room temperature to carbonate?

Does anyone have any experience with this approach? What other options would you suggest?

Cheers, Perk.

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    I now find myself in a quandary. Answers from brewers of vastly more experience than myself giving conflicting advice... So I have gone out on a limb and tried the technique described above risking the fact that it may cause my beer to fail. While I'm waiting for it to carb up (or not, as the case may be) feel free to vote the answers below up or down based on your experience... I'll update this question with my results.
    – Perk
    Feb 7, 2011 at 23:16
  • To bad for the confusion, but this is truly where the style of this site should shine if people start voting, answering and commenting with their real-life tests/experience.
    – brewchez
    Feb 8, 2011 at 13:12

3 Answers 3

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I am going to say that you will have plenty of yeast remaining. It may take a little longer for the carbonation to happen, but it will happen. I have left beer in a cold primary for a month at a time before and still got proper carbonation within 2-3weeks post priming.

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    I can now confirm that using the approach described above did in fact provide enough carbonation after a week or two. I'm happy with the results, and I'm going to use this same strategy again for future brews. In fact, next time, I'm going to Larger my beer for 3 or 4 days rather than the 2 days that I did in this instance.
    – Perk
    Feb 20, 2011 at 21:19
  • @Perk did you make adjustments to the amount of priming agent used? When you say it provided "enough carbonation" does this mean the carbonation amount is lower than you've come to expect when not cold crashing?
    – senfo
    Jan 20, 2013 at 15:51
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I would believe that you would remove too much of the remaining yeast and thus you beer wouldn't properly carbonate. If you did do this you could use a highly flocculant yeast strain at bottling such as Nottingham dry yeast which clears quite quickly.

I would suggest using irish moss or whirlfloc tablets to see if that helps with the clarity.

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It's extremely unlikely that the cold crash will remove 100% of the yeast. There will be some left. It might take a little longer for the carbonation to start, but it will happen.

I have crashed in a fridge and left it there for weeks, and still had enough yeast to carbonate.

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