My Root Beer stinks!! I give up. - Page 2

**Yooper** · 04-28-2011, 04:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BrewingBob

I've got the same sulfur smell in my root beer. I also used Flieshmans yeast from the grocery store. Only I made 4 gallons of it!

Does anyone know if this will go away with aging?

I used bottled spring water, clean and sanitized beer bottles (sanitized with an iodine type sanitizer) regular white granulated sugar from the store.

The extract was an old bottle of rainbows "homebrew" stuff. Probably 6-8 years old.

Thanks in advance:
Bob

The old extract was probably the culprit, but using bread yeast didn't help! I would say it won't improve but you can hold onto it and see and hope for the best.

**Shooter** · 04-28-2011, 05:01 PM

I used to occasionally get a sulfur quality in my rootbeer. This only happened when I was priming the stuff with yeast, these days I force carb. I used ale yeast and would still get this issue. I believe it was yeast related, possibly temp related. I'm not sure what it was. I moved on to 2 liter bottles and Carbonater caps. So, I never bothered to look into it further.

**Yooper** · 04-28-2011, 08:55 PM

The best yeast I've found for soda is champagne yeast- either Lalvin's EC-1118 or RedStar's Pasteur Champagne. A little spoonful is enough, and it's very neutral tasting.

**Shooter** · 04-28-2011, 10:17 PM

This thread has me thinking, I haven't made rootbeer in a while...

**mcarb** · 04-29-2011, 08:50 PM

Making some tonight, but going to keg it and force carb.

sardine · 05-27-2011, 01:21 AM

I've read that you should use ale yeast for fermentation. The reason you don't want to use champagne yeast is that champagne yeast has been developed to live at much higher pressures than ale yeast and your root beer can continue fermenting until the bottles explode. Although this *can* also happen with ale yeast, it is very rare and the conditions have to be just right (including glass of less than the best quality).

**Yooper** · 05-27-2011, 01:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sardine

I've read that you should use ale yeast for fermentation. The reason you don't want to use champagne yeast is that champagne yeast has been developed to live at much higher pressures than ale yeast and your root beer can continue fermenting until the bottles explode. Although this *can* also happen with ale yeast, it is very rare and the conditions have to be just right (including glass of less than the best quality).

That's not true, though! Ale yeast can easily go to 9% and be just as explosive as wine yeast. It's not rare at all for the bottles to blow up if not chilled right away when it's carbed up. Lots of beer brewers who didn't bottle correctly can attest to that!