Coconut can sometimes be a divisive flavour but I happen to like it. I have seen a few coconut beers from commercial breweries over the years and I like the idea so wanted to brew my own.

This coconut milk stout recipe happened to go down quite well with everyone I shared it with and even my wife who doesn’t really like dark beers. The sweetness and full-bodied mouthfeel, plus the layer of coconut complexity works really well so this is recipe is well worth brewing.

Coconut Stout, Does It Work?

I tried a few commercial beers with coconut added and think it works rather well. I guess it all depends on how much you like coconut. When designing this beer though I knew that the coconut needed to be paired with a bold almost chocolatey beer with plenty of body. With this in mind, I decided a milk stout would pair perfectly with the coconut.

How To Add Coconut To A Beer?

I pondered this for a while and as usual, did a bit of research online to see what other brewers have done to achieve a coconut beer. The options really boil down to the following:

Coconut Flavouring

Fresh Coconut

Coconut Liqueur

Desiccated Coconut

I knew that I wanted to use actual coconut in the beer if possible so the flavouring and liqueur could be eliminated straight away. I always think that when you are adding flavours to a beer like this then artificial flavourings or extracts can always be added just before packaging if the actual ingredient you are adding doesn’t pack enough punch.

I have seen on various forums that home brewers have used both fresh and dried coconut with no real consensus as to which provides the best results.

I decided to roll with desiccated coconut firstly for ease of use so I wouldn’t have to process a whole load of fresh coconuts (probably one of the more difficult flavourings to prepare for a beer). Also, desiccated coconut is available almost everywhere and is cheap so the beer can be made by anyone.

Do You Want A Beer To Taste Like A Bounty?

Depending on where you live in the world you may or may not have heard of a Bounty. It is basically a coconut chocolate bar. It consists of a sweet coconut centre enveloped in milk chocolate.

They are by no means the most popular chocolate bar but this is the sort of flavour I am aiming for in this beer so I opted for a fairly large portion of lactose to give the beer a rich, thick mouthfeel and a robust sweetness.

Preparing The Desiccated Coconut

On its own dried coconut is fairly coconutty (not surprisingly) but a little one dimensional. Along with this is the fat content which is a lot higher than I was expecting. In a bid to get a better result and alleviate these two problems I decided to toast the coconut.

Toasting The Desiccated Coconut

I spread the coconut out on a baking sheet and put in a low oven. It takes only a couple of minutes and is extremely easy to burn. After a couple of minutes, the coconut should have turned a golden brown and the kitchen will be filled with a wonderful coconut aroma.

After toasting in a low oven for a couple of minutes blot the coconut between a few sheets of kitchen paper to remove the excess oils.

Although some of the oil will come out of the coconut I did find an oil slick at the top of the fermenter after adding the coconut. I initially thought this would be a problem for head retention but the finished beer seems fine. When racking the beer I tried to rack beneath the oil slick leaving as much as possible behind so this may have helped.

Coconut Milk Stout – Ingredients

The malt for this beer is as simple as it comes and was mainly designed with grains that I have leftover from other beers. I wanted the beer to be less roasty and more chocolatey and to have a real smooth mouthfeel so opted against any roasted barley or black malts, going with chocolate malt to provide the colour and flavour here.

Hops are again really simple as I want the coconut to be the star here so I am not looking for the hops to compete for flavour in any way.

Lactose is added at around 10% of the grain bill. This is on the higher end for my tastes but I want it to be rich and it definitely is. I wouldn’t go much above this myself but up to around 12% would be maximum in my opinion without it being way too sweet and cloying.