Can I condition sulfur in the keg?

[TheMerkle]

I recently brewed up a batch of a really simple hefeweizen. 60/40 wheat/pils and fermented with wlp300. Didn't aerate with oxygen stone, just shook well instead, and fermented at around 63. Fermented 11 days checking throughout and got wonderful scents of banana and clove in nice balance. Decided I'm going to rack 5 gallons to a keg nopw, and cold crash the other for several days before I rack it (just for my own experience).

Enough backstory: I drew a sample off the keg after transferring and the thing smells and tastes heavily of sulfur and rotten egg. I understand that sulfur is typical of the strain, but was convinced not to worry and just make sure it stayed in primary until the smell dissipated. I didnt detect it in primary so I went ahead and moved it.

TL;DR: Will the smell/flavor condition in the keg? Should I be venting the pressure? Should I let it sit at room temp? Any advice?

 

[katfude]

I had a hef that I kegged and starting drinking very young and could definitely smell the sulfur on it, even though no one else seemed to be able to (politeness syndrome is my guess).

The longer it was in the keg, the less noticeable it was. So yeah, time heals all wounds, keg or no.

 

[madscientist451]

I haven't used the WLP 300, but the White Labs website says the optimum fermenting temperature is 68-72F. Brewers comments on the website show that many are using that temperature range or even higher, although some are going lower. Its my understanding that the clove/banana character can also be manipulated by pitching rate.
I did a cider last fall using Nottingham yeast that produced a significant sulfur taste and smell. I finally got rid of the sulfur by chilling the cider to drop the yeast, then adding more apple juice and champagne yeast to restart fermentation. Now that your beer is kegged, I'm not sure there is much you can do about it.
If it wasn't kegged, one option would be to make a new batch and add about 1 gallon of wort and get the fermentation going again, this time at a higher temperature, maybe 72F, and see if the sulfur note will dissipate.

 

[mabrungard]

Sulfur is often a sign of insufficient copper content in your water and wort. If you don't have any copper tubing in your brewing system, that can easily explain the sulfurous compounds you have developed. All you need to do is throw a short length of copper tubing in the boil kettle and it will supply all the copper the wort needs. The yeast take all the copper out of the wort, so it is not hazardous to have copper in your brewing system. In fact, prior to the advent of modern equipment and metallurgy, kettles were always copper.

 

[mkeckjr]

I think Martin nailed one reason you may have with excessive sulfur in your beer, which is lack of copper. Hydrogen sulfide is a natural fermentation product, and through a series of reactions it can convert into disulfide, which I believe is the primary "rotten egg" smell offender. On the bright side, if copper is present, it will react with hydrogen sulfide and form copper sulfide, which has no odor and will generally precipitate out of the solution, so as Martin said, a little copper can usually help excessive sulfur a lot. This is why many immersion chillers are made of copper, so you can use that, or a short length of copper tubing in the boil, or a copper kettle, or maybe even something like copper sulfate as a little insurance against this in the future.

As far as your original question, yes, it can age out. Sulfur compounds are highly volatile, so they will age out often times. One technique people use is called "CO2 scrubbing". I've had a couple lagers that were a bit too sulfury post-fermentation, but had to send them to competition, so I used this technique to quickly gas off the sulfur. I would suggest Googling that as I'm sure there are videos on YouTube. However, if hydrogen sulfide is slowly converting to mercaptan and then oxidizing into disulfide over time, you may have to repeat the process.

 

[TheMerkle]

The only copper in my system is the inside of my counterflow chiller. Probably only takes 15 minutes to cool the wort. Is that amount of exposure sufficient? Thanks for the tips in how to keep my sulfur under thumb in the future and thanks for the co2 scrubbing idea. I've been researching it and I think it's going to do just fine for me.

 

[Cyclman]

You would definitely want to vent the keg to let the odor escape.

 

[jwalkermed]

i will say I had a brew come out with sulfur. It did disipate in the keg but it took a while. It was a kolsch yeast though not hefe

 

[TheMerkle]

Checked it out again yesterday. Definitely improved.