sulfur smell... man its nasty.

no clue about the sulfur, but I think u mean JAO (Joe's Ancient Orange) prolly the most popular recipe here because its so simple, and uses bread yeast. I think you can find it in the recipes section.

How did you rehydrate your yeast, and did you take a pH before inoculating your must?

Acid additions up front are largely unnecessary with mead, especially with fruit that carries plenty of acid (like some types of strawberries). Did you stir your must during fermentation, or at least punch the cap down to keep the fruit as submerged in the fermenting must as much as possible?

Take some time to consider what you did during your ferment and then ask some more questions.

Cheers,

Oskaar

OK - Oskaar works some crazy hours and he may not be able to weigh back in until tonight, so let me add my 2c. First, everything he advised is good info. But it sounds like you did most of what he suggested, as part of your standard good practice. Yet you still have beaucoups H2S. Why? Well, it turns out that if yeast are not supplied with enough available nitrogen early in their life cycle, then toward the end the way they metabolize sugar follows a slightly different biochemical path, and it results in the creation of a lot more free H2S. Some strains are far more sensitive to this lack of nitrogen than others. H2S what you've got, and I suspect that it results from these two things: 1) Red Star Montrachet, from my experience, is one of those strains that has higher overall nitrogen needs than other strains do. 2) You pitched a heckova lot of yeast for a one-gallon must. 5g of Red Star is usually enough for a 5 gal batch. And, you properly rehydrated it, and you ended up with the maximum amount of viable cells that you could pitch from that pack!

So, in a recipe that is clearly nutrient scaled for 1 gallon, you introduced 5x the number of cells. They gobbled up the available nitrogen in their new environment almost all at once and then they were nitrogen starved for the rest of the time they were in there. Their metabolic cycles now irretrievably altered, they have signaled their distress by skunking you.

Now what? Well, there are a couple of things you can do right away to mitigate some of that smell. First, get as much of it out of solution as possible by de-gassing the must. Stir well, and stir often, and watch all that H2S come to the surface. If that isn't good enough, then you can try adding a clean, bright (as in uncorroded) copper rod to the carboy. Copper house wiring actually works well for this; take a piece of 12 ga copper wire that is about as long as your carboy is tall, strip off the insulation, and then polish the surface of the wire bright with steel wool. Rinse, sanitize, and put it in the carboy. Now (horrors!!) introduce a little free O2 by aerating the must. Yeah - I know - if you do this cavalierly, you'll wreck the mead by oxidizing it, but you're going to be careful and just aerate a little bit. If not, you're going to end up with something undrinkable anyway, so just trust me on this. The combination of free Cu ions and oxygen in the mead will react with the H2S and some of the nastier secondary compounds that are beginning to form, and cause the resulting oxidized sulfur compounds to precipitate out of solution. Leave the copper rod in there for a week after aeration, then check for H2S again. If you're lucky, most if not all of it will be gone.

If you're not lucky, secondary reactions between the H2S and alcohol in the mead will have already taken place and you will have created some raunchy smelling constituents that are not easily removed. If that's true, and you're only dealing with a 1 gallon batch here, I'd recommend that you use it to nourish the nearest septic tank and start over. More sophisticated treatments, involving copper sulfate and ascorbic acid, are possible to remove those secondary compounds, but they must be done with extreme precision, the process is not for the faint-of-heart, and if done incorrectly the result is extremely toxic!

Well, when I've done the copper rod thing all I did was to stir enough to splash it a bit as I transferred it into the carboy that had the copper in it. You really don't want too much O2 at this stage, since all you're doing is providing enough dissolved oxygen to support the clearing of that H2S. The other thing that I should have mentioned is that you should swirl and monitor the aroma from your carboy daily when employing the copper rod treatment. Excessive copper in any solution is toxic, which is why you first try the solid copper treatment before employing more drastic measures such as adding copper sulfate. The rod releases very small amounts of Cu ions over time, but the actual amount of ions released is a function of the pH of the must. Keep the copper in there just long enough to clear the H2S stench - no longer. One week is the longest that you should ever leave it in there. The good news is that in the presence of H2S or methyl mercaptan (the nasty that forms when H2S reacts with alcohol), those copper ions will react and form compounds that precipitate out of the wine naturally, so the residual amount of copper in your wine will decrease as more H2S and mercaptan is reacted.

One other thing that I forgot to mention is that you can also, after the aeration and introduction of a copper rod, introduce sulfites into the must. Although it sounds kind of counter-intuitive, putting some K-META, the source of SO2 version of sulfur, into your wine actually provides a way to react the hydrogen sulfide into elemental sulfur and water. While the elemental sulfur isn't something that you want in the finished product, it too can be removed since it will eventually precipitate out. So another racking after the copper rod and the sulfite treatments are done will remove all the nasties that are easily removed once and for all.

BTW - Here's a good web article on the H2S problem and mitigation techniques, for those who want to delve into it a bit deeper: http://www.vawa.net/winemaking-articles/hydrogensulfide.html

plaztikjezuz said:

...snip

now i see this in your post your directed me to:

“you gotta rack this off the lees and trub right away because letting your mead sit on the lees is baaaad!” That’s a load of hooey, as this recipe and others I have posted will prove to you.

Click to expand...

my melomel did sit in the lee and trub for 3-4 weeks and i was thinking this could have something to do with the sulfur? but i have never heard of sulfur be produced by trub in beer but that is protien and not fruit fiber. so who know?
i will tell you from my experiences making beer leaving you beer on the yeast cake for months can lead to autolysis which is a nasty flavor and those flavor can be sulfur. now the one thing that i did do that was different was i pitched 4 times the amount of yeast 1 pk of red star montrachet. now i do know most home brewers do not have to worry about autolysis because they under pitch but i do think here i did hit the propper pitching rate and maybe could have went over?

this is from the BJCP website:

Click to expand...

OK, let's not forget that I was speaking VERY VERY SPECIFICALLY about the recipe in which that quote is from, not for ALL melomels, meads, etc. That recipe is designed to gain more and more character from the yeast and the fruit in the primary as it sit. This is NOT a general statement about lees, trub, extended gross-lees exposure, it is directed specifically at my recipe. I just want to make that very very clear.

Also let's not forget that one of the reasons racking is performed very close to the end of fermentation is specifically because of the production of reductive/sulfur characters. The lees at the bottom of the fermentation vessel are known to encourage the growth of spoilage and odor causing bacteria. This is why exposure to the gross lees is counter-intuitive, and the reason that I stated emphatically in the recipe that my process is for that specific recipe and not as a general rule of thumb.

From WayneB

OK - Oskaar works some crazy hours and he may not be able to weigh back in until tonight, so let me add my 2c. First, everything he advised is good info. But it sounds like you did most of what he suggested, as part of your standard good practice. Yet you still have beaucoups H2S. Why? Well, it turns out that if yeast are not supplied with enough available nitrogen early in their life cycle, then toward the end the way they metabolize sugar follows a slightly different biochemical path, and it results in the creation of a lot more free H2S. Some strains are far more sensitive to this lack of nitrogen than others. H2S what you've got, and I suspect that it results from these two things: 1) Red Star Montrachet, from my experience, is one of those strains that has higher overall nitrogen needs than other strains do. 2) You pitched a heckova lot of yeast for a one-gallon must. 5g of Red Star is usually enough for a 5 gal batch. And, you properly rehydrated it, and you ended up with the maximum amount of viable cells that you could pitch from that pack!

Click to expand...

These are good observations about Montrachet yeast. If you check the Yeast Test post that I pinned in the BrewLog section of the forums you'll see that the Montrachet yeast produced some nasty off flavors that never did work out. I've added Montrachet to my list of yeast that I don't use any longer because I don't like the character, flavor or anything else about the mead I have produced with it. This is not based on one or two batches, but a number of batches over the years. I just plain don't like the stuff.

On the flipside, I've made plenty of one gallon batches and have used 5 gram packages of yeast without any problems, so I think we're talking about a combination of things here that lead to your problem.

OK, I'm going back to acid/pH and nutrient on this as Wayne did.

The internal pH of a yeast cell is near neutrality (pH 6.5- 7.0), while the pH of the medium is 3.0 to 4.0. This creates a large gradient of protons, and entry of hydrogen ions into the cell is energetically favorable. Therefore, movement of amino acids is coupled with that of protons. Amino acid transporters transfer both an amino acid molecule and a proton into the cell. The proton is then exported out of the cell via a proton pump. The pump extrudes protons in an energy dependent manner since excretion occurs against the proton gradient.(Bisson 2005)

Hydrolysis of ATP provides the energy for operation of the pump. Continued amino acid uptake requires efficient excretion of the protons that are being co-transported with the amino acid; so amino acid uptake is a very energy intensive process.

Since amino acid uptake is coupled to protons it's no mystery that the pH of the medium (must in this case) affects amino acid uptake. If the pH is too low, below 2.7, protons tend to enter the cell due to passive proton flux. The proton pump must then be directed towards removal of these protons. The cell has a limited capacity for the removal of protons, thus at very low pH the cell is not able to sustain amino acid uptake due to the lack of capacity of the proton pump.

So, while this is a clone of a recipe that worked out well before, it certainly does not rule out an acid/pH issue preventing the proton pump from functioning properly and carrying out the proton excretion against the proton gradient, which in turn will affect the yeasts ability to effectively metabolyze the nutrients available in the must no matter how much you added.

There are several other factors that impact fermentation and H2S production that are associated with pH as well.

So what I think you have here is a situation where your pH may have been acidic to the point of where the cell metabolism was compromised from the beginning. Once that happens future generations of your yeast are not ideally formed and off odors and flavors will be produced due to yeast stress.

Hope that helps,

Oskaar

YOW! That's a very high pH for drinking water. What's your total hardness and total alkalinity? You're right up almost at the limit of what the World Health Organization recommends as acceptable for potable water without external treatment. One thing to consider -- whenever high alkalinity water is found, often there are high concentrations of sulfur compounds.