After you finish this article, be sure to check out the second part of this series on bottle-conditioning. 

Bottle conditioned beers will probably end up being some of the best beers in your cellar. A beer is considered bottle-conditioned when it still has metabolically active yeast in it after the bottling process is complete. Bottle conditioned beers can further be classified as filtered or unfiltered. With unfiltered bottle-conditioning, the actual yeast that initially fermented the beer is added into the bottle along with the brew. With filtered bottle-conditioning, this original yeast is filtered out and fresh yeast is added into the beer as it is bottled.

There are many reasons brewers choose to bottle condition their beer. As most homebrewers know, bottle-conditioning will add carbonation to your beer. As the yeast munch away on the sugars in your brew, they are releasing carbon dioxide which in turn makes all of those fun little bubbles in your beer. Beers that are not bottle-conditioned have to have CO2 added artificially to them as part of the bottling process.

One big advantage to bottle-conditioned beers is that they can contribute to the flavor stability of a beer. Oxygen is one of the biggest enemies of an aging beer. Oxidative effects can cause many different off-flavors in your brew (we’ll hit on those in a later article). The active yeast in bottle-conditioned beers will actually tie up some of this free oxygen in the bottle as part of their normal metabolic activity. This is known as oxygen scavenging, and it can have a huge positive impact on how well your beer will age.

Part 2 to follow….

Jason

jason@brewbasement.com