No Sulfur, No Cry

First off, thanks to everyone who took the time to vote for my new logo. My graphic designer friend and I are ironing out the last details and the blog will have a new face very shortly.

In the mean time, a homebrew update is in order. Having sufficiently recovered from our tasting session, Carl and I reconvened to rack our second batches of both Pool-Pah Pale and Granfalloons Tripel. Work calls me again to California at the end of this month, which will be followed by a road trip to South Dakota the next day, forcing us to slowly ratchet down our production schedule in preparation for the nearly three week break. If only we had a room cool enough for some lager yeast to work its magic!

We began by carefully moving the Granfalloons upstairs and then set about cleaning our equipment while the beer settled. Full contact time with our iodophor was the only obstruction, so we were racking to the clean secondary carboy with very little wait. A quick gravity reading showed that the yeast had been working quite well and had nearly fermented our wort to beer. It also revealed an ABV percentage over 10%, which will be a first in my homebrewing career. After pausing to taste the beer in process and comment on its deliciousness, Carl went back to cleaning, which I helped with after transferring the Pool-Pah upstairs.

We had minimal downtime once again and the transfer went quite smoothly. The gravity reading confirmed that the yeast had been working, but the beer we transferred over smelled terribly of sulfur. I knew there to be numerous reasons for that and I told Carl not to worry and that it will dissipate. We finished cleaning up and I headed back to my house to get back to work. But not before doing a little research to confirm what I believed about that sulfur smell. At that stage of fermentation, it is actually a sign that all is going well for some strains of yeast. One comment on a probrewer.com forum I was perusing put it simply: “all of that sulfur smell leaving your beer is a good thing. You wouldn’t want it to remain in your beer, would you?!”

Returning to Carl’s to fill a growler of the Mother Night for my trip up to Newport the next day, we removed the fermentation lock and took a whiff… no sulfur. Amazing stuff, this yeast. Even better is when you understand what that amazing yeast is doing.