Cold crash guardian with lager: will sulfur by-products be reabsorbed?

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meaulnes2

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I am not very familiar with lager brewing but I am planning to brew a Vienna Lager soon. My question is about using the cold crash guardian. My brew is around 20 liters and my bladder is around 20 l.
My fear is about the gaseous sulfur by-products. Since they will probably be stored with the CO2 in the bladder, I am afraid that they will be reabsorbed by the beer during cooling.
Has anyone already experimented with this device with a lager and what is the feedback?
Isn't there a favorable moment during fermentation to fill the bladder during which we produce mainly CO2 and few sulfur compounds? Since it only takes about 1 hour to fill it, we could choose this moment to fill it and then close its valve to let the other gaseous compounds produced evacuate out of the fermentation vessel.
 
Lagers are what I brew most of the time. I've never had an issue with the sulfur by-products entering back into my fermenter. I wait until I know that the krausen isn't going to enter into the cold crash guardian before I use it.

This 8 minute instructional video helped me a lot.
 
Lagers are what I brew most of the time. I've never had an issue with the sulfur by-products entering back into my fermenter. I wait until I know that the krausen isn't going to enter into the cold crash guardian before I use it.

This 8 minute instructional video helped me a lot.
Thank you for this feedback.
 
I’ve often thought about this whenever I hear of people capturing CO2 from fermentation for crashing or carbonating beer. It’s not really pure CO2. Maybe the impurities are so low it doesn’t matter.
 
I have a cold crash guardian and have used it with 6 lagers so far and never had any problems with sulphur so I think it’s a nonissue. One of them was a Vienna lager as well.
 
What is the alternative?

Sucking air is obviously worse.

Hooking it up to CO2 is not a bad idea, but O2 contamination of bottled CO2 may be a risk. But if you have this capability, it's standard for commercial setups.

Spunding is going to trap the same gas as the "guardian".
 
I think so.
This would be my thoughts as well. The vast majority of the CO2 produced is being pushed out. I have not heard of anybody worried about sulfur in the headspace of the fermenter was an issue to worry about. The little that might be in cold crash guardian sure seems like it would not make an impact. I use a mylar balloon to protect against suck back, and I cannot say I have noticed any issues. The two times I had excess sulfur in a beer were ones I pressure fermented.
 
I'm rather sceptical this would actually happen and happen to a significant degree, but...

FWIW many breweries in the Czech Republic use open fermentation for their lagers. So does the marvellous Private Landbrauerei Schönram in Germany, and their head brewer Eric Toft said the reason was the expulsion of sulphurous compounds ("ausstinken" was the term he used).
I can't seem to find the reference right now.

But I imagine that this is also a matter of scale: I think those large, deep fermenters used by larger breweries retain much more sulphur in the beer than on a homebrew scale. I'd actually like to retain a little bit more of it, firstly because it's an effective antioxidant and secondly because imho a little bit of "lager stink" is an integral element of a good lager. #lagersaintclean
 
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