This is a term that is thrown around a lot. It's very popular in our Facebook group and a lot of people talk about cold crashing their beer before bottling or kegging.

Personally, I don’t do cold crashing, I just like to brew with as little steps as possible but that’s me. Okay, so Cold Crashing is basically using the cold to drop all that sediment out of your beer. If you want to get a clearer beer you should use this method.

So, if your brewing a lager or pilsner or even a super hoppy IPA and you went commando with all those hops this would help make sure all that gunk settles to the bottom.

In order to do this you only need 1 thing, a fridge, its super simple to do.

What you will want to do is once your beer is done fermenting and is ready to bottle, you will want to put your fermenter in the refrigerator for 12-24 hours for the cold crash.

When you are getting ready to bottle you will want to sanitize all your equipment and get everything ready to go, then take your fermenter out of the fridge and get to bottling.

If you let your fermenter sit back out at for room temp too long before bottling, you can start to undo the hard work you did by putting your fermenter in the refrigerator.

What cold crashing does it that it gets the remaining yeast that is left over after fermentation to flocculate or in simple terms, they will clump together and fall out of suspension and settle to the bottom of your fermenter.

This will help reduce the amount of trub and all that stuff that can get into your bottles during bottling.

A little separate tip, a lot of people do this here in the office, but if you prop something under the front of your fermenter all the yeast will settle towards the back which will help keep the spigot clear during bottling.

Okay so some quick FAQ answers.

You can cold crash any style of beer, does not matter if it is an ale or a true lager fermenter with lager yeast.

The cold does not kill your yeast, it just helps it go to sleep. That is why we always harp on the proper fermentation temperature so your yeast will be the most active.

Your cold crashing will not affect your carbonation process. You will still want to leave your bottles at fermentation temp for carbonation.