Bringing it back to beer, coconut is the one adjunct that I found can make a pastry stout too sweet for me. I once tried to add coconut to a homebrew porter and the whole thing was a drain pour..though maybe it wasn't the coconut.
Coconut, if done right, should be awesome in a stout. Unfortunately, I’ve never had one that I’d call awesome.
coconut is indeed awesome in a stout, but it's a touch ingredient to pull off. best commercial version i've ever tried is boulevard's imperial stout X with coconut. apparently firestone walker make both merlin and parabola with coconut but i've never tried them.
i tried once to add coconut to half a batch of homebrew, and didn't get it right... ended up dumping half the batch after i got tired of trying to choke it down. coconut has a lot of lipids (oils and fats) which you generally don't want in you beer. i suspect my attempt at dry-coconutting a beer failed because the oils went rancid: between the aging on coconut and then bottle-conditioning it was warm for at least a month. might even have been two months. a real shame because the beer (an imperial chocolate stout) was excellent, so i ruined half of a perfectly good batch trying to add that flavor. should have left well enough alone.
