Many of us have issues with storing beers in the cold. I live in a flat, so have no cellar and no shed to put my beer in. I do, however, have a fridge I keep at about 10-12 degrees celsius. I have been maturing some of my homebrew (stout and bitter) with great results.
However, I don't have room for everything (I have to eat and cool commercial beers somewhere!)
From our latest batch we have two boxes of neatly packed porter (24 bottles in total) I'd like to leave for a couple of months at the back of a cupboard. The rest of the batch is going in the fridge today for about three weeks (if we can wait that long).
So here's the actual question:
Does cold conditioning ale (as opposed to lager) have positive benefits other than speeding up the maturation process? Will a beer stored in the cold taste noticeably better in the long run, or does it just get the beer to drinkable standard quicker?
On the same topic, here's something interesting from fellow beer writer Ron Pattinson's new blog (http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/). It's from a 1950s German book, so presumably only relates to lagers:
Pale beers need to be lagered longer than dark beer. Only after a longer lagering period is the strong hop taste transformed into a noble bitterness. Dark beer on the other hand lose during too long a lagering their fine malt aroma. Stronger beers also demand longer lagering times than those of a lower gravity; also beer has to lager longer in cold cellars than in warm ones. Normally dark beers are lagered for one and a half to two and a half months, pale beers two to six months. Pale export beers which are unpasteurised are lagered for up to a year and very cold, so that as much protein as possible is eliminated. Beer with insufficient secondary conditioning are only lagered briefly, since longer lagering only makes the faults more obvious.
