homebrewandbeer.com

In browsing a distilling site I came across the following statement:

"Copper is still used in all major distilling plants as it acts as a catalyst for removing sulphides (rotten egg gas)."

It made me think that if copper can speed up the removal of sulphurous compounds in spirits, can it do the same for beer? And particularly beer made with lager yeasts (eg. S23) which develop a stinky sulpher smell during fermentation and which takes ages to dissappear during bottle conditioning.

I have a few old copper pennies. I thought I might suspend them in a bag in a lager brew to speed up (ie. catalyse) the breakdown of sulpher compounds. Is this something that might work? Or an I likely to get a toxic brew (ie. heavy metal poisoning).

Cheers.

Sounds dangerous to me....another avenue for introducing bugs?

I have used S23 for a number of brews recently and have found that if you keep the temerature down; the sulfur smell is pretty much gone whilst it is still in the fermenter (ferment for 3 weeks at 12degs). It is faintly detectable after bottling but after a month is gone - think of it as a good way to let your lager mature without the temptation to indulge before its 'best after' which I am discovering is a minimum of 3 months in the bottlle for a good lager/pils with S23.

T