It’s the end of the line for your taste-buds. Those little sensory receptors are about to kick the bucket, give up the ghost, and buy a pine condo. The COD? Death by Coconut Irish Porter. Creamy coconut and bittersweet cacao dance an Irish jig with a smooth, perfectly malty porter as the background music. Your tongue will think it’s died and gone to beer heaven with this richly flavorful 6.5% ABV winter seasonal.
“There are few beers that have such a bold, very dessert-y type flavor,” said Tim Matthews, our Head of Brewing Operations. “It’s good for the wintertime, and you can literally have it for dessert or enjoy it with rich, Eastern-European type foods like borscht. It would work well with barbecue too – sticky, carmelized flavors really shine alongside DBC.”
Death by Coconut was born by collaboration with Shamrock Brewing in 2014 and won a silver medal in the chocolate beer category at GABF the same year. When asked what the 2017 batch tastes like, Matthews said, “Same as ever. The coconut flavor is a creamy coconut. We don’t toast it but use raw, dessicated coconut to achieve that creamy flavor. It’s paired with liquid Cholaca chocolate and both of those flavors are married using Simpson’s Crystal Extra Dark malt in the porter.”
The HOBO explained that translating the 2014 small batch collab brew to a yearly seasonal offering – a 5X increase in volume – initially presented some challenges. To manage the solids load and encourage stability, the brewers now use Cholaca liquefied chocolate. Cholaca is a local company, started in Boulder in 2012, and their pure liquid chocolate is made from cocoa nibs which have been sustainably grown, fermented, and naturally processed. Because it doesn’t result in cloggy sediment like solid forms of chocolate, or contain flavor-changing additives, the product has been praised by brewers for simplifying the task of adding chocolate flavor to beer.
Our brewers make the porter, then chill it prior to filtration and let the yeast fall out, clarifying the beer as much as possible so that the yeast doesn’t strip the beer of flavor. Then they recirculate the porter with coconut and chocolate. Longmont Weaselette Bonnie Byrum described the olfactory result: “It smells like a tropical island in here when they add the coconut.” When taproom guests ask about the beer Bonnie explains, “you’d think it would taste really sweet, but it’s actually a bittersweet chocolate flavor, which keeps it really balanced and drinkable. Some people wait all year for Death by Coconut.”
Tag and bag those taste-buds and Pass. Dash. Hit. with us at our upcoming Death by Coconut release parties:
10/20: Brevard, NC, DBC Release Party
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