Glossary
Bottle conditioning
Carbonating beer through a secondary fermentation inside the sealed bottle, using residual or freshly added yeast and priming sugar.
Also called bottle conditioned, conditioned in the bottle.
The full record
Bottle conditioning has its own catalogue entry with the detail this page summarises — causes, thresholds, related styles and evidence.
Bottle conditioning — Carbonate beer through a secondary fermentation inside the sealed bottle, using residual or freshly-added yeast with priming sugar.
Bottle-conditioned beer contains live yeast, which continues to scavenge oxygen and so slows staling. This is a genuine advantage for beers intended to keep, and part of why Belgian abbey ales and English strong ales are traditionally packaged this way.
The trade-off is a yeast sediment, which must be left behind in the bottle or deliberately roused depending on the style — a Belgian tripel is normally decanted off it, a Hefeweizen deliberately not.
Related
- Priming — The sugar addition that drives it.
- Sediment — The yeast layer it leaves.
- Cask conditioning — The cask equivalent.
More vocabulary
Arrested fermentation · Barrel ageing · Batch sparging · Biotransformation · Blending · Bottom fermentation · Burtonisation · Cask conditioning · Centrifugation · Cold break
See every term on the glossary index.
Last reviewed 2026-08-16.