Cold Crash prior to Dry Hop in Primary

[mbbransc]

I usually gelatin and cold crash my beer after fermentation and rack to secondary for the dry hop. I do this for (2) reasons; 1) to harvest the yeast and 2) to keep my fresh hop oils away from the yeast that may stripe it out of my beer.

My last two batches of beer showed signs of oxidation after 5-6 weeks in bottles. I currently have 10 gallons of IPA in buckets so it's going to take a while to drink through it. I want to do what I can to limit the oxygen exposure while still using just the equipment I have.

So, if I cold crash and gelatin the beer but leave it in primary, after the temp raises back up to 68*, will the yeast become re-suspended? Or will they stay at the bottom of the bucket? Given that they will be minimally disturbed/moved prior to racking to bottling bucket a week later.

(using WLP090 and VT Ale yeast, if that matters)

thx

 

[kombat]

In my experience, your beer will become hazy again. When I've done this, what I found was that as the beer warmed back up, CO2 bubbles effervesced out of the yeast cake at the bottom of the fermenter, which launched little blooms of yeast upwards back into suspension with each bubble. If I had to guess, I'd say this was because the yeast were still (slowly) active as the beer cold crashed, and the CO2 they produced stayed in solution (because the beer was getting colder and colder, and thus better able to absorb CO2 into solution). Then as the beer warmed back up, its ability to hold CO2 in solution diminished, and the CO2 came out of solution, launching little plumes of yeast with it.