I’ve decided to try my hand at a coconut porter. I didn’t think much about it. It can’t be hard right? Don’t you just put some coconut in your beer? We’ll. I found it a bit trickier than that.
I went out and bought two bags OG sweetened shredded coconut. I guess it’s not as simple to just buy unsweetened toasted coconut. So I took what I could find and then toasted it in the toaster oven. Great. Now I have toasted coconut. Now what?
I realized after a while that my coconut had to actually go into my beer. But what about all the coconut oil? Isn’t that bad for beer? Should I put it in a grain bag to make it easier to remove? How will this work?
What I decided to do is take the easiest path. I racked my beer to a secondary and dumped in all my coconut. I gave it a gentle stir to get the coconut off the surface. When I removed the spoon it was covered in oil and waterproof. Hmmm. That doesn’t seem good. Nothin doin now. I closed up the fermenter and tossed it back in the fridge.
A week later I opened it up, racked to a bottling bucket through a grain bag, took my FG reading, primed with sugar, and bottled that sucker up. A brief tasted revealed that this beer needs aging. It will either be amazingly good, or amazingly bad. Next week I’ll find out. Until then, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.