Two recent beers I have made (a bavarian hefe and a wit) finished with a heavy sulfur aroma and taste. It was almost discourage from making another wit and since it is my second failed bavarian hefe I dont think I will make another soon (aside from the sulfur my bavarians have been all clove and no banana).
wyeast 3944 and 3068 were used respectively. Fermented at 65 F with a chest freezer and johnson.
What is wrong? What can be done to avoid this in the future?
Thanks
Going forward, please remove your johnson from any beers.
can you give us more details Re: your recipe and process?
Sulfur can be from the yeast, particularly if it not a super healthy hearty fermentation, underpitched etc.
there are some hop varieties that can leave an onion/garlic/sulfer thing behind.
An experiment to try is to stir the offending beer with a piece of copper (a bit of copper pipe or similar) and see if the sulfer compounds go away at all.
+1 to Mort. If you keg, you can purge the headspace every couple of hours with CO2 for a couple of days. That usually helps too.
Dave
the wit recipe:
5 lbs pils
4 lbs flaked wheat
1 lb flaked oats
8 oz rice hulls
4 oz munich
1 oz hallertauer added at 60 mins
.4 oz corriander (indian) lightly cracked
.03 oz chamomile flowers egyptian
and 1.5 oz of fresh orange zest
all added with 5 mins left.
1.5 L starter with pils dme gravity of starter around 1.040, yeast nutrient added to starter. wyeast 3944 package was only 2 weeks old
water distilled with 0.8 g gypsum, .6 epsom, 0.2 canning salt 1.6 cacl, added to mash water
sparge: 1.1 gypsum, .9 epsom, .2 canning salt, 2.2 cacl,
finished water profile: 51 ppm ca, 5 ppm mg, 5 ppm sodium, 56 ppm sulfate, 72 ppm chloride, ra -39, so4/cl ratio .78 mash ph 5.4
mashed 60 mins single infusion with a batch sparge. intended 152 landed about 150
sparge water 168 F
pre boil gravity spot on post boil missed target low by i think 4 points 1.046. 60 min boil. chilled with immersion chiller quickly outside in freezing cold 30 mins down to 165.
transferred to fermenter and back and forth between two buckets 5-6 times to aerate. pitched and sealed.
fermented for three weeks at 65 degrees. with my johnson…not my penis
bottled didnt keg. next on my list: kegging sysytem.
the bavarian was pretty similar in process water profile not much different.
Other than what seems to me overcomplicated water additions (but to each their own) I don’t see anything inherent. maybe someone else will be able to chime in.
in defense of my water i live in a very hard water zone and it was the simplest way i could find im order to get my ra down to an appropriate level for this beer. People around here tend to have good success with their dark beers but their lighter beers tend to miss the mark.
Which I tend to correlate with the water they are using. My cream ale and american hefes come out great. But i use kolsh and cal ale yeast with them.
I think it is the yeast strains? I just want to figure out how to avoid or correct this sulfur problem. I thought about trying white labs instead? Maybe it is the ferm temperatures?
I don’t have experience with these particular yeast strains, but some throw a whole lot of sulfur and it just takes time to clear it out. Raising the temp a few degrees at the end of fermentation may help clear out the sulfur a bit quicker.
Try opening the bottles and letting them “breathe” for a minute or two before pouring. It could be that the sulfur has continued to off-gas in the bottle and just needs to clear out of the headspace.
What is the age of these beers? Sulfur always disappears with age, even if it is really strong. Normally this takes 3 to 4 weeks, but it can sometimes require several months. If it is still fairly young, then relax, it will surely age out. Just needs some time.
Could they be light struck?
the beers fermented for about three week in primary and then were bottled. The wit beer only has a few weeks in the bottles. The tricky thing about aging out sulfur is that I have been told wheat beers have a shorter shelf life and are intended to be drunk early. I dont know if that means a month or 2 or what?
not light struck that is for sure. fermented in basement and went into brown bottles and then put back in the basement.
Wheat beers are indeed best young. Figure about 6 months before the flavors start to fade. But your sulfur will probably be gone long before then. I guess I can’t say for sure, but probably about a 90% chance the sulfur will be gone or almost gone in one month to where you can enjoy the beer without issues.
Both of those strains are notorious sulfur producers. You can take measures to reduce it during fermentation (increase gas exchange surface area of the beer i.e. ferment in more shallow container, make it as easy as possible for the blow off to actually blow off). If you have to rush the beer into being ready, there are sometimes things you can do post-fermentation too. Like employing copper during a racking process, etc.
A possibility is that you are smelling DMS, a sulfur-containing compound that smells like canned corn or a corn refinery, or that the yeast reduce DMS to hydrogen sulfide, which has the classical eggy sulfur smell. You may not be boiling enough to drive out all the DMS-precursor compounds since you are using a Pils malt and you missed your post-boil gravity.
boiled for 60 mins in cold cold weather I wasnt surprised that i missed my gravity. Next time I would do a 90 min boil but I dont know if I would do 90 in the summer.
I don’t see a reason why the water would contribute to excessive sulfury notes. It is probably the yeast. Another good practice is to make sure that wort contacts copper during the brewing process. Copper complexes with sulfurous compounds in the wort and removes them as a precipitate. I piece of copper tubing may be all you need.
I didn’t mean to imply that the water might have anything to do with the sulfur. I am just not used to seeing so many different salt additions. but I also use RO instead of Distilled so perhaps you need the extra sodium in that case. I’m also lazy so if I don’t need it for the calcium or the chloride/sulfate balance I don’t add it. (or pH of course)
I used 3068 in a hefe and it had a sulfur smell while fermenting. Without looking at my notes I had it in the primary for about the same time, but probably a little higher temp. I cant remember how strong the sulfur smell was when I bottled it, but after conditioning in the bottle a few weeks it was not there. As far as the banana goes the lower temp may have not produced as many esters as I did have banana flavor. Also according to their website, overpitching the yeast may reduce the banana flavor.
Also if it was cold outside and you did not have a rigourous boil could the sulfur compounds from the mash not have boiled off?