Roast n' Toast Coconut Stout

Roast and Toast is the latest beer in our ever expanding range of experimental ales from our trusty pilot kit. This time round it’s an exploration of the humble coconut.

I’ll be honest I’m not a big fan of coconut, but I’m a bit of a curry nut, so I cook with coconut milk regularly. But otherwise I tend to avoid it, especially in beer! We had a couple of kilos of it sat in the brewery from another project that never quite got off the ground, so I figured I should give it a blast and try and face my coconut fears.

From this starting point I started designing a recipe, I wanted to aim for a relatively high gravity with a fairly balanced stout base but also have a thick and luxurious body, which is a characteristic that I enjoy in all of my favourite stouts that I have enjoyed. The grist contained pale ale, wheat, chocolate malt, chocolate wheat and roasted barley, with a single hop addition of Challenger which I had enjoyed using in the Odin’s Tears. The yeast for the beer was a London Ale yeast that has a slightly fruity and estery flavour and aroma, allowing the malt aromas and flavours to really shine through.

Once the fermentation was almost complete I very gently toasted the coconut to a rich golden colour and added it to the beer. Toasting the coconut gave it a sort of biscuit, chocolate cookie kind of vibe.