Talk:Bottle conditioning

I recognize that this is not a how-to guide, but it would nonetheless be helpful to know roughly how much fermentable material is added prior to bottle conditioning.

shelf life
"Filtered beer tends to have a relatively short shelf life, rarely more than a year, as many compounds in the sterile beverage break down into unpleasant tasting ones. Live yeast inside the bottle acts against these processes, giving the beverage a much longer shelf life. A good bottle conditioned beer can maintain its drinkability for many years, and some can be aged for decades."

is this really so? if this is the case, why do the large breweries bother with filtration at all? plus i thought the ability to age or "cellar" a beer is more dependent on its ABV rather than whether or not it is bottle conditioned.24.91.127.58 (talk) 14:54, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

ABV isn't what determines whether or not you can age a beer. Regardless of the ABV, what would be the purpose of aging a beer that isn't bottle conditioned? Nothing would happen. You only want to age a bottle conditioned (or, "live") beer, such as a Belgian Ale that still has plenty of active yeast in the bottle. Over time, the flavor will change and the ABV will increase a little bit.

Filtration is done mostly to removing any kind of "hazy" appearance from the beer, and to make sure all the beer comes out exactly the same. The big macro-brews like Coors or Budweiser are very consistant from batch to batch (all of their beer sucks equally). I'm not sure if it's true that filtered beers really have a shorter shelf life than unfiltered ones (if so, can someone provide a source for this?). But, there certainly would be no point in aging or cellaring a filtered beer.

To be honest I think filtered beers sometimes have a longer shelf life than unfiltered beers-this may be one reason why the big breweries filter their beer. I know from experience that there are a lot of bottle-conditioned "real ales" from Great Britain that have a relatively short shelf life. Deepfryer99 (talk) 18:16, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Kräusening
I've never heard of "Kräusening" before, is this a commonly used term? It sounds like it's basically the same thing as priming: you just add some sugar or wort before bottling. I'm not sure if this deserves its own paragraph, after priming has already been mentioned. Deepfryer99 (talk) 17:59, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Food and drink Tagging
This article talk page was automatically added with WikiProject Food and drink banner as it falls under Category:Food or one of its subcategories. If you find this addition an error, Kindly undo the changes and update the inappropriate categories if needed. The bot was instructed to tagg these articles upon consenus from WikiProject Food and drink. You can find the related request for tagging here. Maximum and careful attention was done to avoid any wrongly tagging any categories, but mistakes may happen... If you have concerns, please inform on the project talk page -- TinucherianBot (talk) 04:14, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Effect on strength of beer
The article currently states "Bottle conditioning is normally done to add carbonation, and does not usually add much alcohol to the beverage". Is this true? Is it possible that it can add more alcoholic strength to the beer?--E tac (talk) 22:31, 30 September 2008 (UTC)