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hey all.
I have 3L of 40% neutral spirit that i had resting on carbon for 2 weeks, and this morning filtered off the carbon, and added a bottle of 'still spirits' white rum essense, plus some smoothing syrup, and dumped in a blend of shredded and dessicated coconut. I plan to maserate the spirit for about 7-10 days, then filter, and add a coconut rum/sugar base to it.
I am really chasing that nice coconut smell and flavour, so i was thinking about maybe adding a can of coconut water to the spirit as well? I wouldnt be able to use coconut milk as it would never filter out clear i imagine? would be really cloudy? maybe over oily? Has anyone pulled off a great Malibu/coconut recipe?

Also, while on this subject, is it possible to use coconut milk in a wash? or even a half sugar/coconut milk wash? I read that there is hardly much sugars in coconut milk?
would the oil content give the yeast a hard time? I suppose more to the point, would the actual flavour of the c'nuts come through the spirit, or would it just be a waste of time.

anyone?

I wouldn't use coconut milk.

I like coconut rum a lot. The way I do it is take a lightly aged rum and add about a half inch of shredded coconut to the bottom of a quart jar, then I top it off with the rum. I then let it sit for 48 hours and filter it through a cheese cloth, at this point it's pretty cloudy. Take the filtered rum and put it in the refrigerator for a week or 2, when it settles out pore it through a coffee filter. Be careful not to pore the bottle part of the rum through the coffee filter, you want to leave the sediment in the bottle as it will clog the filter.

Take the sediment and use it in the the next bottle your going to soak, that way your not wasting anything.

J,

In order to get to something like Malibu, apart from Rum and coconut, you might want to add sugar to sweeten it up. I do not like my likker sweet, but Malibu is. I use around 200 grams of sugar per liter, but that is on a essence based Malibu lookalike. I aint proud of it, but the missus loves it, so what better to do than keep some bottles ready! Maybe with the coconut dissolved in it / macerated in it, it will already sweeten out a bit. Another thing: Malibu is 21% strong and that is seriously easy going. If you use rum, coconut and sugar, you may want to involve some distilled water to bring down your ABV. Well, if that is what you want!

odin.

RD when you say shredded coconut. Are you talking the dried type for baking? I personally hate the dried coconut stuff. But I love fresh coconut meat. So could shredded fresh coconut be used? Or would the juice in it be a bad thing? As far as making it cloud up.

Prairiepiss wrote:RD when you say shredded coconut. Are you talking the dried type for baking? I personally hate the dried coconut stuff. But I love fresh coconut meat. So could shredded fresh coconut be used? Or would the juice in it be a bad thing? As far as making it cloud up.

Fresh will contain more fat. More clouding.

Prairiepiss wrote:RD when you say shredded coconut. Are you talking the dried type for baking? I personally hate the dried coconut stuff. But I love fresh coconut meat. So could shredded fresh coconut be used? Or would the juice in it be a bad thing? As far as making it cloud up.

I use the dried type for baking. It does make it a little sweet, it also makes it cloud a little which is why you put it in the fridge for a week to let it settle.

I've never tried fresh coconut so I don't know.

I took a fifth of silver rum and put in a cup of Coconut meet shredded and let it sit for 2 months...didn't do any thing really. I then went and got some all natural Coconut flavoring from Frontier. Its Oily though. I added 5Tbls of it to the fifth and that definitely got the smell their, but still not the taste of the Malibu. I am guessing that sugar is essential. I will see what I can find as far as Coconut sugar maybe the dried stuff like you all mentioned.
Any new feedback would be greatly appreciated!!

works great.

I just played around with some sugar water and coconut extract and made a very good coconut rum. I'm not exactly sure how much water I used because I just poured it in from an aquafina bottle, but an approximate recipe would be:

1.5 cups of pure water
5 - 6 tablespoons of sugar
2 - 3 teaspoons of imitation coconut extract

Put the sugar and water in a sauce pan and stir frequently while heating until sugar is completely dissolved and water is clear. Remove from heat and add the coconut extract. Let cool and add to plain white rum. I flavored a little over a liter of rum with this. If you don't want to dilute your rum any, just use less water (may have to heat a bit more so all of the sugar still dissolves)

That sounds like a quick and easy fix there, dime. Another thing that could be done is to make coconut sugar. While your rum is sitting on the coconut shreds in the bottle, put some fresh coconut meat in a small container and put some sugar on top of it. Seal it tight. Sugar is hygroscopic, so it sucks the moisture from everything around it, including all the tastiness of that coconut. So when you sweeten your malibu knockoff, you'll be adding even more coconut flavor. Actually, I think I'll try this myself this coming week. I hate sweet likker myself, but the wifey likes it.

zouthernborne wrote:That sounds like a quick and easy fix there, dime. Another thing that could be done is to make coconut sugar. While your rum is sitting on the coconut shreds in the bottle, put some fresh coconut meat in a small container and put some sugar on top of it. Seal it tight. Sugar is hygroscopic, so it sucks the moisture from everything around it, including all the tastiness of that coconut. So when you sweeten your malibu knockoff, you'll be adding even more coconut flavor. Actually, I think I'll try this myself this coming week. I hate sweet likker myself, but the wifey likes it.

This is a cool idea! I'm going to try it on my next batch!

Would be nice if I could get some good fresh coconut meat. It's not to fresh by the time it gets to my neck of the woods.

just realised - it would then count as coconut panty dropper!

frozenthunderbolt wrote:just realised - it would then count as coconut panty dropper!

That just don't sound right.

frozenthunderbolt wrote:

zouthernborne wrote:That sounds like a quick and easy fix there, dime. Another thing that could be done is to make coconut sugar. While your rum is sitting on the coconut shreds in the bottle, put some fresh coconut meat in a small container and put some sugar on top of it. Seal it tight. Sugar is hygroscopic, so it sucks the moisture from everything around it, including all the tastiness of that coconut. So when you sweeten your malibu knockoff, you'll be adding even more coconut flavor. Actually, I think I'll try this myself this coming week. I hate sweet likker myself, but the wifey likes it.

This is a cool idea! I'm going to try it on my next batch!

You'd be amazed at the kind of stuff you learn at a community college baking school...lol. Those instructors know how to get every ounce of flavor for the least amount of money. And they don't waste anything.

Just wanted to chime back in on this one. A couple days after my last post I took a fresh coconut from my local grocery and shredded some of the meat up and plopped it down in a 750ml bottle of 42% white rum. I let it sit for a week then filtered out the coconut and sweetened with the coconut sugar. It was cloudy, but cleared up nicely in a couple of days. And now after 3 months the flavors are just delicious. I made the wife and myself each a banana smoothie with it and it was amazing. So if anyone is thinking of trying this I highly recommend it.

zouthernborne wrote:Just wanted to chime back in on this one. A couple days after my last post I took a fresh coconut from my local grocery and shredded some of the meat up and plopped it down in a 750ml bottle of 42% white rum. I let it sit for a week then filtered out the coconut and sweetened with the coconut sugar. It was cloudy, but cleared up nicely in a couple of days. And now after 3 months the flavors are just delicious. I made the wife and myself each a banana smoothie with it and it was amazing. So if anyone is thinking of trying this I highly recommend it.

Definitely going to give this a try, are you guys oaking first?

Here's something I been doing forever for coconut rum. Go to the grocery and get a little bottle of Coconut FlavorEssence for cooking. Add it to 1.75L of Rum. Done. Malibu is sweeter but I dont add sugar since the mixers generally are sweet enough.

No joke. Its scary how good this works.

Jimbo wrote:Here's something I been doing forever for coconut rum. Go to the grocery and get a little bottle of Coconut FlavorEssence for cooking. Add it to 1.75L of Rum. Done. Malibu is sweeter but I dont add sugar since the mixers generally are sweet enough.

No joke. Its scary how good this works.

I do the same but with UJ as making rum is expensive for me. Great results. I just keep adding, keep tasting until desired flavour is reached.