This page is dedicated to the awesome folks at the Mountain Sun brewpub and restaurant in Boulder, CO. Thanks for being so cool as to reach out to the homebrewers for some inspiration. I hope you decide to make a habit of it so others may share in this experience too.
I first heard about this contest back October 2006, when Levi at What's Brewin' mentioned a contest the Mountain Sun brewpub was putting on for homebrewers. The topic was stout, and so was the beer. The pamphlet said it all: February is stout month, and in addition to their normally excellent selection of stouts they wanted to do an informally judged homebrew contest and allow the winner to brew a 6 barrel batch to put on tap at the Sun. "Very cool," I thought. "I'll give it a try."
My initial thought was a vanilla stout. Recipes seemed plenty, I prefer sweet stouts, and it seemed relatively straight forward. I started with a typical stout recipe... 2-row for the sweets, black patent, chocolate and roast barley for color and flavor, and a bit of various wheats for texture. Willamette hops down the board. I was going to save flavoring it for later, during secondary fermentation.
So what do thai food and stout beer have in common you might ask? (Like that transition?) Well, there was a time last summer while making thai food and licking the really bad for you part of the coconut milk off the lid that I decided a coconut beer would probably be pretty tasty. This thought kept running through my mind while watching the little yeasties in the carboy work on coverting the sugar into alcohol. I was faced with a dilemma: a coconut beer would be pretty cool, but brewing one would certainly limit my chances in the contest. A vanilla stout would be perfectly good and much more traditional. I decided to throw caution into the wind and brew what I was interested in, and be content to enter the contest with something a bit crazy.
And crazy it was. After purchasing 5 lbs of shredded unsweetened organic coconut and some kind of weird coconut juice (not milk) from a health food store, I went to work preparing it for the beer. The coconut was shredded further in a blender, and some of it was toasted. The rest was boiled with the coconut juice. After racking the beer off of the primary, I added all of the coconut stuff to the carboy through a funnel. It was actually easier to do this while siphoning so I could wash it down. After finally getting it all in there, I found myself thinking "Oh my, what did we DO?"
Some of the coconut sank, some floated to the top, and some bobbed merrily up and down in the beer. But by the next morning there was a four inch cap of fat that had pushed the airlock off during the night. The beer was fermenting again like crazy. I sanitized a better cap and replaced it, hoping to avoid infection.
One of my coworkers offered this little gem describing the beer: "Coconut Cream Stout. Dark-colored opaque frothy beverage. Served in glass. Contains alcohol." It is certainly one of the more accurate reviews of the beer I have seen!
Coconut Stout related links:
- Mountain Sun Beers ranked by order at ratebeer.com
- Specific ratings for the Coconut Cream Stout at ratebeer.com
- Mountain Sun Stout Month list by Stefan, who seems to like the Coconuts
- An article was written in the BoulderWeekly about the stout competition
- Levi posted a note about the winners in What's Brewin's E-newsletter
- Here is the recipe if you want to brew it yourself!
- The original contest announcement linked above
- The winners announcement (also linked above).
Please let me know if any of these links no longer work, or if you find another intesting link about this beer.
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