Dryhopping things not hops

[Josh Brown]

Alright so I'm relatively new to experimenting with my homebrew recipes and I'm trying to make a coconut milk stout and added 15oz of coconut milk to the end of the boil for a sweet stout recipe. Unfortunately I'm getting little to no coconut aroma or flavor. Does anyone have any suggestions on whether I should dry hop actual bits of coconut and/or extract, and if so how much should I try?

Thanks,
Josh

[Josh Brown]

Also if anyone has any ideas or experience throwing weird things into the fermenter i'd be interested in hearing about it. :)

[Ray Grace]

The two coconut beers I know of are the coconut porters from Maui Brewing and Stone/Maui/ Ken Schmidt, I believe they use toasted coconut flakes. The collaboration has a huge coconut aroma. My guess is that it's added late in the boil or even "dryhopped" as it were.

The only "weird" things I've added are various herbs and spices which I typically add in the last minute of the boil.

You could probably try some sort of coconut extract, maybe thief off a sample and add dropwise until you get the aroma you want than add an equivalent amount to the batch.

[Shawn, the Beer Philosopher]

Hmmm ... I'll defer to the more experienced among us, but it would seem to me that the coconut milk is gonna add additional fermentables to the wort. What kind of sugar is in the coconut milk, do you know? Unless it's an unfermentable sugar - like lactose - the yeast will eat it up and you'll not end up with much residual sweetness unless you purposefully under-attenuate.

As far as imparting coconut aroma and flavor, I might look at toasting some fresh coconut lightly and adding that to the secondary. This isn't "dry-hopping" the coconut, technically, but it would probably coax out more of the aroma and flavor, I'd imagine.

My two cents.

[Josh Brown]

Awesome, good advice allround, I'll try toasting some coconut flakes and see where that gets me.

As far as coconut milk and sugars are concerned, I'm not sure what's in it BUT I added some lactose so that should keep the sweetness that I'm looking for.