Ok I was supposed to bottle tonight but we lost power yesterday morning during an ice storm...needless to say my final temperature isn't 70 degrees for my pale ale. The wife went by and said it's 54 in the house. So for 2 days it's like I had a mini cold crash. My question is do I adjust my priming sugar measurement to achieve 2.5 co2 level? Or should I go with my original calculation? I don't want to over/under prime because of this damned weather. The power is coming back on overnight according to the power company hopefully. I have a towel around it but I know that won't help. Should I just wait for it to come back up to 70 and bottle tomorrow morning? Thanks for any feedback.
I honestly think such a swing in temperature would be extremely negligible for any effect on CO2 volume and by the time that small amount of yeast gets to doing it's thing with that priming sugar, you'll probably be sitting back at normal post ice storm room temps. I'd say go for it, you'll be good to go. Really, even if it got to 40 deg in the house, you could prime them and just would have delayed carbonation due to the yeasties taking a nap.
That's what I thought. Just wanted to ask some experts. I'll bottle tomorrow when I have daylight and hopefully power. I was going to have to boil my priming sugar on the grill!!!! Didn't want to scorch a pot using my propane burner I sure for brewing
The calculator is asking you the bottling temperature because cold liquid holds more CO2 gas than warm liquid. And if you fermented cold, say a lager, an certain amout of CO2 produced during fermentation is going to remain in solution. And vise versa. If the beer warms up for a few days the CO2 is going to be released. If the beer fermented at 70, it is holding gas as if it were 70, and bringing it down to 40 is not going to put any gas back into solution. It's gone. Not until a secondary fermentation happens anyway, and that will be kept in the bottle because it is capped. The calculator adjust the priming dosage accordingly. So, short story, you're fine. Cold crashing is a good thing anyway. Cheers
Phenomenal point and didn't think of that. You could potentially overcarb then if you say, fermented at 40 and applied an amount of sugar as if you were at 70 the whole time because there would already be more CO2 in solution to start. Great info.
