Monday, August 22, 2011

Koko Brown Update

I pulled a bit of a noob stunt. I turned the pressure up on the Koko Brown Clone to 30psi to carbonate it quickly. We were leaving on vacation, and I thought I should get some CO2 into it before we left. My plan was to turn it down to serving pressure as we were walking out.

As they say, however, the best laid plans of mice and men...

Yes, I forgot to turn down the pressure, and we went out of town for five days. Our return time was dead-of-night, and I was way too exhausted to think about the beer fridge when we got back to the house. When I woke up, though, the first thing I thought of was my little experiment.

I headed out to the garage to see how it was doing, and there sat the CO2 tank, proudly guarding the kegerator, its dial sitting happily at 30psi, its gas-out line dutifully running through the hole in the side of the fridge. And inside the fridge? My precious Koko Brown with more volumes of CO2 than your bean-eating neighbor has in methane.

All is well, though. I took it inside, warmed it up over the next 24 hours, and kept releasing pressure. Of course, to know when I had just the right amount of CO2, I had to keep tasting it. Homebrewing can be dirty work, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Suffice it to say that Batch 2 is very tasty. I'll have to figure out how to filter out the coconut bits, but at least this way you know it's not fake coconut flavoring.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

First from-scratch clone: Kona Brewing Koko Brown

This weekend, Beth (@kefishbu1) and I tried brewing a clone of Kona Brewing's Koko Brown. It is my first attempt at trying to clone a recipe from scratch. If you're a homebrewer, and you've gotten beyond using other people's clone recipes, a next step in the process might be attempting to clone from scratch. There's a great article by Chris Colby in Brew Your Own Magazine titled (surprisingly) "How to Clone".

I didn't start out wanting to create a recipe from scratch. I was actually hoping to find one in a forum or in one of my favorite recipe sources. I didn't scour for long, but my first few searches were unproductive, and I soon lost patience. Following some of the advice from Colby's article, and with some help from Beer Tools Pro, I came up with the following:

Koko Brown Clone
All Grain, 75% efficiency
Single-temp infusion, 154F, collect 7.0 gal, with one hour full boil

Grains:
9.25 lb two-row Briess organic
1 lb Victory (R) Malt
1 lb Munich TYPE I Weyermann
0.5 lb Carapills (R)/Carafoam(R) Weyermann
1.5 lb American chocolate

Hops
0.25 oz Warrior (16.0%) 60 min
0.25 oz Millenium (15.5%) 45 min
0.5 oz Cascade (5.5%) 10 min

0.5 oz Willamette (5%) 5 min
Other
1.0 lb flaked organic toasted coconut
Wyeast 1056 American Ale Yeast (I always use a starter of light DME)

Thanks to a lack of hops and the way our local homebrew shops stock different ingredients, I had to modify this some:

All Grain, 75% efficiency
Single-temp infusion, 154F, collect 7.0 gal, with one hour full boil
Grains
9.25 lb two-row Briess organic
1 lb Victory (R) Malt
1 lb Munich TYPE I Weyermann
0.5 lb Carapills (R)/Carafoam(R) Weyermann
1.5 lb American chocolate

Hops
0.27 oz Columbus (15% (for Warrior (16.0%)) 60 min
0.27 oz Chinook (12.5% (for Millenium (15.5%)) 45 min
0.5 oz Cascade (5.5%) 10 min

0.5 oz Willamette (5%) 5 min
0.5 oz Fuggle (4.8%) 5 min [this was actually a mistake; forgot to turn off this ingredient for the printout, but I used it anyway]

Other
1.0 lb flaked organic coconut, toasted
White Labs WLP001 California Ale (in a 1 litre starter)


I toasted the coconut myself, under a broiler turned down to 300F. I put about one pound in a jelly roll pan, and left the door cracked. As the coconut began to turn a golden brown, I rotated the pan 90 degrees. After three rotations, and some re-positioning under the broiler element, I had a nice layer of toasted coconut. I then mixed the coconut and repeated the rotation/mixing process two more times before removing it to a bowl to cool.

Our brew buddy, James, came over and got in on the action. Between us, we made three batches:

  • Batch 1: James infused the coconut in the mash
  • Batch 2: Beth and I boiled the coconut in the kettle for the last 15 minutes
  • Batch 3: We'll make a tea using boiling water and the toasted coconut, and we'll dilute to 2 quarts before pitching in secondary
As I write this, the beers have been fermenting for about 48 hours. I'll do another update as soon as I have beer to taste.