I'm a big fan of coconut and coconut/vanilla, so I thought I would take a stab at a coconut rum. A friend brought me like 8 gallons of molassas so .. seemed like the right thing to do.
In addition to a relatively standard rum wash, I purchased about 4 raw coconuts, cracked them open, dumped the raw coconut water in the wash, harvested the meat, shredded about 2/3rd of it and toasted it in the oven and took about 1/3 and left it raw. Dumped it all in the fermenter.
Fermented out great. Charged the still with it, and did a stripping run. Looked and smelled excellent. Not sure any of the coconut came over, but so far so good.
Took about 5 gal of spirit @~67% and macerated about 4 coconuts worth of shredded and toasted meat in it for ~week. Again .. I'd say the coconut flavor extraction was minimal at best. Probably not proofed enough.
I think this is where I went sideways in a big way. Proofed the spirit run down to about 20% and added another 4 coconuts worth of shredded, toasted coconut to the still charge to distill "on grain" so to speak. I have a jacketed boiler so no scorching.
But man . .. the final product is weird. It's definitely got some off flavors that remind me of being a kid in the south and drinking from the hose in the summer. That sort of rubbery / hose smell. It's mellowed out a little bit .. but still reminiscent of that smell you get when you are blowing up a cheap pool float from walmart.
And on top of all that, cleaning the still was a major pill. That coconut meat is so dang oily and running the still with all that in the boiler. It's really amazing how much coconut oil formed on the top of the still charge once it cooled down.
So .. either the advice is "don't mess with coconut as a mash / wash ingredient .. definitely don't distill with it in the wash. Or there's a bunch of advice on how to use coconut in the distilling process that I'm not away of
Regardless, I'm going to be more careful about coconut, and maybe i'll stick to adding coconut flavors post spirit run.Chris