Sulfur aroma in wheat beer with US-05

[kugeman]

I use US-05 as my house yeast and I'm getting a strong sulfur aroma in my wheat beer. This only seems to happen in this one beer, which is a low gravity (10 plato) american wheat. Malt bill is German Pils malt (Bestmalz), Malted Wheat (Thomas Fawcett) and about 10% unmalted wheat (Briess). Very low bitterness (10 IBU with Horizon hops) with a small boil stop aroma addition of Falconer's Flight. Fermentation is usually at 66 F, with a slight rise up to 70 towards the end of primary. Usually 7 days warm for primary & secondary ferment, and then 5-7 days at 35F. The beer is unfiltered.

I use US-05 for many of my beers, and I don't get this aroma in any of the other ones, even other beers which are light in flavor or fermented in similar ways, or are also unfiltered.

However, this is the only beer I regularly brew with unmalted wheat, or with that much malted wheat. Has any one ever run into this problem with their wheat malts?

The only wildcard I'm unsure of otherwise is whether the yeast pitch is new (dry) from the package or if it is repitched from the cone of another beer, and whether that makes a difference on the intensity of the aroma. I get this sulfur aroma frequently in this beer (but not every time), but I also frequently use this beer to start a new pitch of yeast.

I've been removing the offensive aroma by scrubbing and venting with CO2, but I'd rather just avoid it in the first place.

Any thoughts?

[almalkin]

While I've never experienced any issues with sulfur from this yeast strain, we were recently having an issue with intermittent sulfur in one of our beers. Our beer is a saison that does use some wheat, along with oats. The advice that we ended up following, which seems to have worked very well, was to eliminate the blowoff hose. Any kind of pressure on the fermenting beer seemed to have kept the sulfur from being scrubbed out.

I don't know what your fermenter setup is, but we ended up leaving our CIP arm open and sticking a sanitized foam stopper in the end. Not sure if you are having the same issue that we did, but it was an easy fix for us!

[yournotpeter]

Not sure if my story will help at all, but I have had my share of sulfur wranglings as a homebrewer and completely fixed it. So, not sure if this helps or not, but here is the scenario:

Made my very first Hefeweizen with WLP300 Hefeweizen Ale yeast. I was using a copper wort chiller that I put in the boil with 15 minutes left in the boil. Grain bill was 50% Dingemans Pils and 50% Briess Red Wheat. Simple Hallertau addition at 60 minutes. Fermented at 62. The beer turned out utterly amazing. Beautiful balance of banana and clove.

I then upgraded my system, including moving from the copper wort chiller to a Blichmann Therminator plate chiller. I brewed the same Hefe recipe, yeast, temp, etc... and it turned out horrid with huge sulfurs. Figuring I screwed something up, I did another one and had the same sulfur issue. I gave it another try, this time increasing my fermentation temp....still same sulfur smell and flavor.

At this point I'm miffed and begin doing a crazy amount of research on sulfur. What I came across revealed that something about the recipe - whether it was the yeast or grain bill - relied on copper in the boil to reduce those sulfur compounds during fermentation. So, I did another one and simply put my old copper chiller in the boil with 15 minutes left. I still used my plate chiller for cooling, went back to the 62 degree ferm temp and BAM beautiful beer, no sulfur.

Every Hefe I do now I put that old copper chiller in the boil and I have had no sulfur issues.

SO, take my findings for what they are worth....but I was one happy brewer once I figured out how to get rid of that sulfur.

Good luck!

[yelram4life]

Me too

Hutch, I had the same issue in MY US-05 American wheat and I scrubbed it the same as you. However I also experienced the same problem with our golden ale which I've since discontinued and it didn't have wheat in it. I've also wondered why it seemed to only happen in lighter, lower IBU beer styles and I've kinda convinced myself that it had something to do with wort pH? I started adding ~.5g/gal gypsum to the mash and dropping the HLB to 6 with Phos. and it seems to have done the trick but it could be entirely psychosomatic...

[Gbbc]

I also use US-05 as our house ale yeast and find similar problems with one of our low hopped/gravity beers. I reckon that US-05 can through sulphur on the first pitch for some people and is probably more noticeable when there is not allot of hops to mask it. I don't find it as one of the nasty sulphurs. I does fade after a week of cold conditioning. I also think that our dryhop beers does not have as much sulphur as the low hop beers due to the fact that when I dryhop on day 5/6, there is still allot of CO2 in suspension coming out of solution when I add the dryhops, thus "scrubbing" the beer to some extend.

I did a brew yesterday following WaterEng advice with the copper tube. Bought a piece and added it to the kettle during the boil. I will be doing our low hopped beer soon and keep you all updated on the outcome.

I do see allot of people having issues with US-05, and I've also had similar issues that has now been rectified. I think that there is a general thought that dry yeast is robust and indestructible, which is not the case really. For storing purposes, it is very robust compared to liquid yeast, after that it should be treated with the same care as liquid. If you don't rehydrate it properly, you might as well skip that step altogether. If you dry pitch it too cold, lag time increase causing off flavours and so on.

Cheers

[LongLiveLagers]

I've found over oxygenation and over pitching leads to sulfur in weissbier strains.