Got a sulfur smell coming from one of my meads - I added blueberries to it a couple days ago.
Never had this before - anyone know if the mead is bad now?
#mead #brew #brewing #brewstr #meadstr
Discussion
possible something rode in on the blueberries man
the way we always did it was:
make your honey decoction with all the ingredients
add to a sterilizer container
and put the airlock on. don't touch it until you're ready to bottle.
I'd be too afraid of contamination to open it up partway through.
Yeah, I would have preferred to do it that way. My "philosophy" so far has been to do it all at once and don't touch it, don't even rack it. But... I really really wanted to try something and figured it could be an experiment.
So far I've determined that its H2S, and its probably from stressed yeast - so the blueberries stressed the poor buggers.
I shook it. Tempted to shake more.
whats H2S?
Hydrogen sulfide - from stuff I just read, sulfur smell is from either that or SO2, and the former smells more eggy
gotcha.
yeah either way, youre probably just going to keep an eye on it and hope for the best 😀
Yeah. Magic! That's why I like mead - I don't like measuring stuff and kinda want to be surprised.
Also just learned that if a fruit has low nitrogen content, that somehow inhibits the yeasts' digestion and gives hydrogen sulfide. I don't really want to learn the chemistry, but it looks like I might be about to...
lol everything is a learning opportunity
i had no idea about the h2s
making mead is awesome.
I have an idea... Not one I'm going to try any time soon, but still... So the problem is that the solution is "reductive" - there's not quite enough electrons running around, so atoms are sharing a bit more than they typically would. This is potentially solved by adding more oxygen by shaking, but I've heard its bad to add more oxygen after that initial shake. Sooo.... What if I ran a low current through it for a minute or two? Idk if this would do it... But I kinda wanna try
Its been a few days and the sulfur smell hasn't returned. Victory. But now I'm worried about the opaqueness of it. Even after pectinase, its the most opaque witch's brew I've ever made.
probably bad because yeast doesn't reduce sulfur into hydrogen sulfide