I am using a recipe that calls for lagering the beer for 4 weeks at 35 F, however my refrigerator will not go below 39. Can i age the beer longer for an equivalent reslult

I suspect you should be fine lagering at ~39 F.

Colder is better in this regard but....

- Scott

It looks as if the refrigeration unit was able to get down to 35 so there should not be a problem,

However another question somewhat on topic.

When bottle conditioning lagers, I have found that the priming sugar (dextrose) seems to make the beer very foamy when bottling, this does not seem to happen when i am bottling ales at room temperature. Would it make sense to pull my lagers out of the refrigerator for a day or two to let it come to room temperature before bottling?

It sounds like a bit of CO2 was absorbed beer while lagering. While lagering the system is not a completely open one since the pressure needs to be sufficiently high to force bubbles out the airlock. So while the beer lagered there was a small positive pressure of CO2 which allowed it to dissolved into the beer. Then when you agitated the beer while adding and stirring in the priming solution at least some of the CO2 was released. Of course, you didn't want to be too vigorous when stirring in the solution so probably some excess CO2 remained and was expelled during the actual bottling.

Well, that is at least my take on things. I'm not sure this is indeed the case but it seems to make sense.

You could more vigorously stir the priming solution in but this would tend to introduce oxygen which may lead to associated off-flavors.

Since the amount of CO2 that can be dissolved within a solution is inversely related to its temperature (i.e. colder solutions can hold more CO2 than warmer solutions) your idea of warming the beer up and letting it stabilize prior to bottling sounds quite reasonable.

You may wish to gently swirl the beer a bit to help liberate the CO2 before you prime etc.

Please let us know if this makes a difference.

- Scott

P.S. Note that although ales are also subjected to the same low CO2 pressures the contact time tends to be considerably less than that of lagers. Also because of the warmer temperatures of ales the amount of CO2 than could potentially be picked up would be lower.