Extra Hard Lemonade- bottled, but have a BAAAD sulfur smell!!!!!!!!!

Followed this recipe to the letter. It fermented about 3 months, then I bottled. It had a sulfury smell at bottling, but I'm hoping that will fade. About two weeks post-bottling, and it has not faded at all. I realize two weeks is nothing, and I'm willing to ride it out. I read this post today that made me think that, once it's in the bottle, the sulfur smell might never go away!

What's your experiences? I'm willing to let this age if it will fade, but if it won't, I'd rather move on than waste more time on it.

Thanks!!!!!!!!!!

I don't have any experience with sulfur in the bottle, but what will you lose by putting it away and pulling out a bottle in a couple of months just to check progress? To my way of thinking, you can only gain by doing that...just my 2 cents.

I had a bad sulphur smell in a cider that I tried to age out for 6 months. No dice.


Pretty sure the sulphur smell comes from the yeast running out of oxygen during primary fermentation or an over-abundance of CO2. I was told that if you smell it coming out the airlock during active fermentation, you need to degas and oxygenate ASAP.

Sorry to say my experience with this sort of recipe is that once it is there it does not go away. Montrachet may be the worst yeast of all for this recipe in my humble but limited opinion.

See:
Testing and treating for H2S
New Yeast for Skeeter Pee
Cider/Apfelwein - Avoiding Rhino Farts for SWMBO

Right now since it is bottled you pretty much have no options to get rid of it. What you can do, what I discovered worked very well, is to serve with a slice of fresh lemon twisted so that the oils come out as well. Seems to get rid of the funk. That or power through a couple and after that you can't taste/smell it.

I used the same recipe you linked to the end of March. I made 2 batches both slightly modified.

Batch 1: I scaled the recipe to 1 gallon and used all lemonade, no limeade or pink lemonade. I also added 1/4 tsp of baking soda to cut down on the acidity, airlocked it and left it alone in a dark cabinet and everything went smooth, no smell, and it's already bottled.

Batch 2: I made the 5 gallon batch, again all lemonade and 1tsp baking soda and I reduced the sugar to only 4 cups for the whole batch since I wanted a lower alcohol content and I used 2 packets of EC1118 instead of the Montrachet because I was afraid the 5 gallon batch would have trouble getting started with the Montrachet. This batch had the very bad sulfur smell!!

Batch 2 fermented in one week down to 0.994 on 4/8. I was unable to rack it until 4/12. I racked it into another bucket splashing it from up high to try to aerate out the smell. Then I took a stick blender with a whisk attachment and whisked the whole batch and airlocked it. Did some reading online that night about the sulfur smell and on 4/13 decided to open the lid back up and we poured the lemonade and back and forth between 2 buckets SEVERAL times to aerate it even more. Airlocked it. Then I got to thinking that any sulfur that got released would just get trapped in there so I removed the airlock and hooked up my foodsaver vacuum to the lid to suck out the air. I did this once on 4/14 and once on 4/15 (I guess removing the lid would have done the same thing but I am a newbie and was afraid of oxidation if I didn't get the air out of the bucket because there was no more fermentation). I let it age airlocked in the bucket for 2 more weeks and checked it again and a slight smell was still there but just barely noticeable. I whisked it up again with my stick whisk and airlocked it. A week later checked on it and the smell was gone. I racked it onto sorbate, k-meta, and some more cans of lemonade concentrate and then ran out of time to bottle so it's sitting in a carboy right now but there is no smell other than lemon.

On another note, when we first racked it and it had a horrible sulfur smell, we racked 1 qt of it into a pitcher for taste testing. Added 1 can of frozen barcardi strawberry daiquiri concentrate mix to it. Left in the refrigerator with the top of the pitcher vented and within a week the smell was gone too (I did shake it up several times a day to help release the smell). My fridge didn't smell very good all week but it worked!!

I would not give up on yours. Maybe pour it all back into a bucket and whisk it every day until the smell goes away. I was too chicken to play around with adding copper sulfate. I can't guarantee the whisking will work for you because I started treatment about a week after the smell, I don't know if having it in the lemonade for as long as you've had it there makes it harder to get rid of or not. Good luck!!

Thanks for all your help guys. I think I'll try pouring it into a bucket and aerating to see if that helps. I'd hate to lose 5 gal!! I'll post back my results. Thanks again.

Don't aerate. If it is carbonated then degass. If it is not and you can do it, "aerate" with CO2 and a stone.

Also check out the "Treating" link above that I posted. This worked for me.

Where do I get copper sulfate?

kingogames said:

Where do I get copper sulfate?

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It's sold as root killer. I got more than I will use in a lifetime at Lowes for $15 I think. It is in blue crystals. Here are a few places to buy:

https://www.google.com/search?q=roo...29,d.dmQ&fp=5ea720a8f935fd02&biw=1920&bih=955

ETA: Before the "food grade" police jump on that - you are using this in parts per million. That means that a 99% pure product will have impurities in parts per billion. Think about that when you worry.

I've never made a hard lemonade, but sometimes my lagers will have a sulfur aroma. I've been able to remove most if not all of it by kegging it, filling with co2, purging all the gas, re-filling with co2 and repeat for about a week. Any time i've bottled anything with a sulfur smell, it hangs around. Not sure if you have a keg setup though.

I had this problem and I used a piece of copper wire that I cleaned with sandpaper then soap and water santized and put it in carnoy for about 5 mins around 4-5 time the sulfur smell went away

So I poured out my 48 bottles into a fermenter. Now I have it in there with a towel sprayed with Starsan over the top. Now I wonder what to do next? I'm thinking of going the copper sulfate route, but i've never done anything like that and I don't want to poison anybody! I have a degasing wand that attaches to my cordless drill. What about doing that say once a day for 5 min until the sulfur goes away, do you think that would work? Is there a way that someone without chem experience could calculate the CuSO4??

Thanks for all the suggestions, please chime in here guys!

kingogames said:

So I poured out my 48 bottles into a fermenter. Now I have it in there with a towel sprayed with Starsan over the top. Now I wonder what to do next? I'm thinking of going the copper sulfate route, but i've never done anything like that and I don't want to poison anybody! I have a degasing wand that attaches to my cordless drill. What about doing that say once a day for 5 min until the sulfur goes away, do you think that would work? Is there a way that someone without chem experience could calculate the CuSO4??

Thanks for all the suggestions, please chime in here guys!

Click to expand...

You are not actively fermenting so my guess is it would be degassed pretty quickly ... like after the first time. Additional work will potentially oxidize.

Follow the CuSO4 instructions in the MoreWine paper linked in the above article. It's not difficult at all if you read it carefully. Go to the drug store to get some infant liquid medicine syringes and you should have all the fancy stuff you need. If you don't want to try that then they make mention of racking through a copper tube as a potential fix as well.

kingogames said:

So I poured out my 48 bottles...

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I hope you poured that beer out very carefully, without introducing excess air (O2). You have a finished beer (with alcohol) that is prone to oxidation. The best would have been to pour against a CO2 stream, into a keg.

Kingogames, yesterday we bottled the batch we got rid of the sulfur smell in (see my 5/16 post) and it tasted pretty darn good. I think I read that lemonade is less prone than other wines to oxidation because it's high in acid. As I mentioned in my last post, I am a newbie so I don't know what it would taste like if it oxidized but I know it was very drinkable and smelled nicely of lemonade. Please post back in a couple of weeks if you get rid of the smell and how you did it.

Will do. Thanks.

As the source of that recipe, I'll chime in with two things...

1) Never had a sulfur problem with that brew. My only big sufur problem came when I used fruit punch concentrate and cherry pie filling... *le shrug*

2) I found that this recipe takes a long time, and in the end isn't all that strong. I've switched to brewing THIS and it's AMAZING. Easy, done in 2-3 weeks, strong. Spot on. Defeat, admitted.

Thanks brazedowl, I'll give that other recipe a shot on my next go round.

I've got that new recipe in the fermenter. SG was a little low for some reason, so I added about a pound of sugar. Should end up around 7-8%. So it takes about two weeks to ferment out?

I followed the recipe and it was at 10% potential. Mine bottomed out to 1.000 in about a week then I let it sit another week so some of the yeasty pulp can settle out. No sense waiting for it to clear up.

Mine took a little while to get going. Started on 5/28, but didn't really start fermenting until Friday. Going great now though. I'll check the SG on Tues, but I think it'll need another week to ferment out.