Cold conditioning / lagering a belgian ale

[Gadders]

The reason is that cold beer has a higher amount of C02 already dissolved in it. Your ice cold beer has quite a lot of CO2 already in it, straight out of the fermenter, so you need to add less in the form of priming sugar to achieve the same level of dissolved CO2 in the bottle.

But surely if a beer has been fermenting at say 20c then is cooled to a lagering temp it would still have have the same CO2 concentration as it did at 20c. As a beer is lagered when fermentation has finished so there is no more CO2 available to absorb? There is still the potentail to absorb CO2 but it cant if it is not there?

[lancsSteve]

No - there's two different dynamics here: temperature (more CO2 can be held in solution at lower temps) and production, lagers will have been fermented at lower temperatures and then chilled down to lager with yeast still active in it and producing some Co2 (it doesn't 'stop' at the end of fermentation just slows as part of conditioning - this is even slower when lagering but co2 continues to be produced and more can be held in solution at lower temps. So you start cold and have lots of co2 in solution, go colder meaning any more can be held in solution and then don't need to add as much so less priming sugar...

Unless there's some massive flaw in my understanding I'd not spotted!

[chivelegs]

First trial bottle opened last night, and it's marvellous. Very much like Duvel and very subtly pear-ish. I ended up splitting the difference as regards priming sugar between what I would normally add and the temperature-adjusted figure I got from Brewpal which did seem a bit low. Worked a treat, so thanks for the advice.

Only problem is that I didn't have enough smaller 330ml bottles so had to drink a whole 500ml last night after a few IPA's. Standing up was a bit tricky later on.