A question about coconut

TandemTails · Oct 9, 2015

I've got 3.5gallons of a coconut chocolate stout fermenting away right now. I added about 10oz toasted coconut to the mash, 10oz toasted coconut to the boil at 15 minutes and I plan on adding another 10oz (maybe less?) to secondary in a week.

My question is this... How do I want to prepare the toasted coconut for secondary? It seems like I've found the following options:

1. Simply toss the toasted flakes in the carboy (either in a hop sack or not)
2. Make a 'tea' by boiling the toasted coconut in water, straining out the coconut and then reducing the resulting liquid.
3. Make a tincture by submerging the toasted coconut in vodka and then adding the solution to secondary (either with or without the flakes).

I've tried searching online but it seems like anything that involves the words 'coconut' and 'tea' or 'tincture' eventually leads to results for coconut oil and cannabis which obviously isn't too helpful for homebrewing.

m00ps · Oct 9, 2015

Ive used up to 4 lbs of coconut before and it worked well. No issues with residual oils affectiong head retention. Dont try to make a tincture with that much coconut here what I did:

- toast coconut in oven at 350F for ~20 min until brown, turn them over a few times for even distribution.
- I assumed this more or less "sanitized them" so I took them (still hot) and dumped them in a ziplock bag. Youll nee an oven mit to handle the pan
- I didnt secondary. 7 days before bottling, I put them in a sanitized muslin hop bag (2 of them) wieghed down with marbles and droped them into the fermentor like a dry hop

Rosmucman · Oct 9, 2015

I "dry hopped" with 250 grams of toasted coconut. I just toasted it and put it in a sterilised hop bag while it was still warm and I didn't get any infection or off flavours.
If I was to do it again though I d double the amount of coconut.
I hardly got any flavour from it.

Peruvian802 · Oct 9, 2015

I toasted 16 oz of flaked coconut and then added it to secondary for 5 days to make my coconut porter.

m00ps · Oct 9, 2015

yeah my 4lbs was still a bit subtle. Problem is even the coconut itself doesnt have too much flavor. But youd need like 2 gallons of vodka to cover that much coconut for extraction. It wouldnt really be a "tincture" but more coconut vodka...

ruger988 · Oct 9, 2015

I recently used about 3oz of American Oak soaked in Coconut Rum in 5gal of a Chocolate RIS for about 72 hours. The coconut flavor was amazing, definitely there, but far from overpowering.