Coconut

Ingredients
1

I just tried a sample of a coconut chocolate stout I’m brewing that I pulled for a gravity reading. I’ve so far used a half pound of lightly toasted coconut at 15 in the boil and .75 lbs toasted coconut as a dry addition for 6 days now.

I’m not picking up any coconut. It’s supposed to be an Almond Joy Stout, so I want the coconut to be obvious. Any ideas and experience on how to pack coconut flavor? Should I go with a coconut extract from the store. I was planning to add another 12 oz to a pound of toasted coconut for another week, but with no coconut flavor so far I don’t want to just blindly add more if it doesn’t get the desired flavor. This is my first time using coconut.

2

I’ve read about brewers using a bit of coconut rum for flavor.

3

Which is probably just coconut extract + light rum. I’d just go with the extract and dose to taste.

4

Thanks…

So I had a lesson I thought I’d learned before really driven home last night. Palate’s are a weird thing. I pulled a small sample to take to a friends house last night. Suddenly the coconut really shines through and is the dominant flavor. How I could have missed that when I tasted earlier just freaks me out a bit. In less than 2 hours I went from noticing no coconut at all to being able to pick it out no problem from samples pulled from the same fermenter.

I do think I’m going to add a bit more toasted coconut for another week.

5

I recently brewed an Almond Joy Stout that nearly had too much coconut.  I threw in 0.75# of toasted coconut at flameout and then ‘dry-hopped’ with 2# of toasted.  You could smell the coconut across the room when I started pouring it.  I used the ‘loose’ coconut in the large bins at my local Whole Foods.  I figured that coconut was fresher than the bagged stuff.

  • I also added 4oz cocoa powder at flameout and 5oz toasted almond slices in the dry hop.
6

I made a coconut porter a couple of years ago with flaked coconut from an organic cooperative; I added it to the fermenter a week in, I believe (didn’t think to toast any of it, though I will next time). The beer was delicious, though the coconut absorbed a lot of the wort, so it was a small batch made smaller. My one regret was not realizing how delicious the wort-soaked coconut would be. I had a couple of tastes before I chucked it, and wished I had asked friends over to have some of it over vanilla or chocolate ice cream.

7

Ohhh, good idea. I may bring some to snack on for our next bottle share night this weekend.

8

glad you ended picking up on the coconut. IME, it doesn’t take much and for very long before that coconut dominates. I use it in the keg for coco brown ale and a few days is all I need/want.