Anybody ever brew with coconut? What did you brew ? How much did you use ? When did you add it ? what were your results ? Any suggestions ?
I did a coconut brown. Used 1.5lb of unsweet coconut flakes in the oven.
added them in secondary. Should have used a little more.
They were a pain when it came to racking out of secondary.
Ended up with coconut flakes in the bottles.
But the beer was pretty tasty.
Added toasted, plain coconut in the secondary in a big mesh bag (IIRC about 1# per fermenter), nice flavor, but killed the head entirely with the oil.
I brewed a toasted coconut porter at Christmas time. I used 1 lb of unsweetened coconut and toasted it in the oven. I added it to the secondary for 4 days then bottled. No head loss and nice flavor at the beggining and at the end.
This is timely. The guys at OliveNation
http://www.olivenation.com/Pure-Coconut-Extract-P560.aspx
make some very good gourmet extracts and they have a boatload of flavors. I was just talking with some guys on another board about a porter recipe and using it as a springboard for either a coconut porter or a vanilla porter. I used some very good vanilla extract in a holiday beer that came out fantastic. I’ve had enough of fiddling with vanilla beans and almost every post I’ve seen about playing with the coconut has sounded like a PITA. So I’m going all-extract-all-the-time. And remember… this stuff is not the cough-syrupy stuff you find at the LHBS. This is much better. I have the raspberry and the blackberry too. Cheers.
Havent tried coconut but I did buy some very high quality vanilla extract from Penzey’s spices a while back that worked very well.
Every couple of years I brew a coconut wheat beer.
50% 2-row
50% white wheat
18-20 IBUs of a noble type hop
Wyeast 1010 or 1056
one pound of unsweetened flaked coconut in the secondary
I tie a small hop bag over the tip of the racking cane when I bottle to prevent any coconut getting in the bottling bucket.
I brewed a shakespeare stout clone from CYBI with the meat from 1 whole coconut, grated and toasted, thrown into the primary after about a week and left for 2 weeks. Actually I got the idea from one of the shows at the NHC. I wanted to use the coconut water too but it had soured by the time I went to add it to the beer, so I left it out.
When I went to keg I had forgetton about the coconut so I thought the beer was full of maggots floating on the surface, just for a second. Heh, then the lightbulb went off. I kegged into two 3 gallon kegs and added about a tbs of vanilla extract to one keg. I didn’t have any problems keeping the coconut out of the keg, most of it floated on top.
The coconut flavor was very subtle, almost to the point where you wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t told. The batch with vanilla smoothed out the roasted flavors of the stout and made a very nice beer. The batch without vanilla was a very good stout, but a little rougher around the edges. After a couple months of aging there was very little difference between the two, both very good. The coconut did not affect the head in my batch. Next time I’ll probably try 2 coconuts since the flavor was so subtle.
