I've been reading a lot about wine making lately and am wondering: Why couldn't you add sulfites to beer to stabilize it over long conditioning? Anyone know why this is expected in wine and never mentioned in beer?

Sulfides are added to guard against oxidation. The recommended dose is 1/4 teaspoon per 5 gallons of wine. If you add too much sulfides, you will get very noxious sulfur-like odor and the results will be undrinkable. I do not see a problem with adding sulfides, I have not tried it with beer. I think the alcohol content in beer or wine is enough to preserve the drink without using sulfides.

One of my friends has a weekend job at a small wine making place. He said they use the sulphides to arrest fementation at the point they think the wine has reached its best potential (most modern wines arent designed to be aged, or so I have been led to believe.) This is before everything that could possibly ferment has fermented. My beers seem to age pretty well without being stabilised (I've got one that must be at least a year old by now), infact I think sulphides might prevent them from ageing in the way they are meant to, it seems to get "drier" over time, unless you want beer full of sweet unferemented carbs? I have used sulphides in a mead I'm doing but that won't be ready to try for another 8 months, so I'm not sure if it was a good choice yet.

While everything you folks said is true, my research showed them using it before fermentation (24hrs) to kill off any nasties in the must. Then after total fermentation they use it before any aging just in case there's any nasties. I don't have problems with my beers, I just always have the gears turnin'.

curlyfat wrote:While everything you folks said is true, my research showed them using it before fermentation (24hrs) to kill off any nasties in the must.

Before fermentation!? I'm quite surprised. Once I used sodium meta-bisulphite to sterilise my bottles before bottling and it seemed to slow down, significanly slow down, the bottle fermentation that creates carbonation. It took about a month for them to carbonate, instead of the ten days I'd usually wait, the ones I tried before a month were still sweet with unfermented sugar. However it was also the first time I did a yeast starter from a bottle of Coopers so maybe the yeasts were very weak?

Many processes call for adding meta bi-sulphite to the must and letting it sit for 24 hours before pitching the yeast. Apparently it all dissipates by then.

I've heard that corn has stabalizing properties in beer. Not sure of the science, or the amounts.