A Question of Conditioning

[ade1865]

I've got a Cooper Sparkling Ale conditoning at the moment. It spent 3 weeks in primary before racking to bottles. I believe it should need 6 weeks conditioning to reach its peak.

My question is does any of the time spent in primary count towards this 6 week wait, or does it only start when I finally got it in the bottles?

[Stonch]

i'd say the latter, i've found that after 2 weeks primary and 4 weeks bottled a beer has yet to reach it's best. Give it another fortnight and bob's your bleedin uncle innit.

[ade1865]

well thats alright then, so taking both sides into account I can happily drink it all 'summer' long!

I'll keep an eye on it and let you know what I fink.

[Stonch]

We've decide to age our Scammonden Dark until winter... it's had almost four weeks in the bottle already. Tried some last week, and detected all those off putting green flavours that I now know go away after time.

Of course it's not surprising that some beers take longer to reach their best than others. A dark malty brew is clearly going to benefit from a long storage period.