Minneapolis Town Hall's Three Hour Tour Clone

Looking back on 2009 and all of the great beers that I sampled, one stands out in my mind. Minneapolis Town Hall's beer called Three Hour Tour. It's a Milk Stout brewed with raw coconut and some chocolate malts. The beer is lightly chocolaty and lightly coconuty and tastes a lot like a Mounds candy bar. I'm not the hugest Milk Stout fan but the sweetness is very light in this one and it works well with light chocolate and coconut.

After talking to the bartender, she said that 165lbs of coconut was used in the brew. According to our half assed (and somewhat buzzed) calculations, that comes out to about 1.88lbs per 5 gallon batch. I want mine to have that nice coconut flavor that the original does so I'll round up and use a full 2lbs. Another question of mine was whether or not the coconut was raw or toasted. She assured me it was just raw shredded coconut. We'll see... Turns out raw coconut is not all that easy to find. In fact, it's impossible to find if you wait until the last minute (literally, I was all set to brew and "ran" out to grab a bag). I'm sure specialty or ethnic stores carry it but just a regular grocery store does not. Everything is sweetened. So after checking every grocery store within a couple mile radius I gave up and just bought a couple bags of the sweetened stuff. I figured if I just soak the coconut in some water for a couple minutes and rinse it really well, that should get all that sugar off. Hopefully it doesn't change the flavor in the coconut.

Since Milk Stouts aren't my favorite I didn't exactly have a go to recipe to brew up. I did a bit of research and patched together a couple different recipes that I found on the internet. I wanted that light bit of caramel and chocolate but definitely didn't want them to overpower the coconut. I settled on what I thought would work well with a pound of chocolate malt and a couple pounds of crystal. I also wanted to add a bit of oats to aid in the silkiness of the mouthfeel but since I'm retarded, I forgot to add them to the mash. I also decided to hopefully get maximum flavor out of the coconut, I'd add it to the boil with 5 min left along with the Irish Moss and Lactose. Fingers crossed!


Recipe
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Batch Size - 5.5 gallons
Boil Size - 6.4 gallons
Total Grains - 14.25lbs
Anticipated OG - 1.076
Boil Time - 60 min


Grains
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10lbs 2 Row Base (37ppg, 1.5L) - 70.2%
2.0lbs Crystal 50-60L (34ppg, 30L) - 14.0%
1.0lbs Chocolate (29ppg, 350L) - 7.0%
0.75lbs Wheat Flaked (36ppg, 2L) - 5.3%
0.50lbs Black Patent (27pp, 500L) - 3.5%


Hops
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1oz Challenger (8% Pellet) - 60 min
1oz Kent Goldings (5% Pellet) - 15 min


Yeast
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Wyeast 1084 - Irish Ale (71-75%, 62-72F)


Extras
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2 lb Coconut - 5min
1/2 lb Lactose - 5 min
1tsp Irish Moss - 5 min


Brewed December 5th 2009

12/05/09
Minus not finding the raw unsweetened coconut and forgetting to add the oats to the mash, everything went fairly well. After I had added the coconut, I let it come back to a boil for about 2 min before adding the wort chiller. I aerated the beer as best as I could from my racking cane but the coconut was plugging everything up. So I just poured the entire pot into my fermenting bucket. I was going to add the coconut trub to the primary anyways so no worries. Original Gravity clocked in at 1.060. Shit, missed my target by 0.020... Gotta slow down when I drain the wort from the mash.

12/20/09
Racked to the secondary and seriously left a TON of crap in the bottom of the bucket. The yeast, hops and coconut looked very weird together. The Final Gravity came out to about 1.020. That puts me at around 60% efficiency. Lame Dan, lame... The taste had a nice milk chocolate aspect to it with a light sweetness. Definitely didn't add too much Lactose thank the lord. The only thing that sucks is that coconut is fairly light. I'm hoping once it sits and conditions and is bottled the coconut will be a bit more pronounced.

1/18/10
Bottled this today and got exactly two cases of delicious beer. The gravity was still sitting at 1.020 so I probably should have bottled this a few weeks ago. The sample that I tried was MUCH better than what I tried out of the fermenter. The coconut was much stronger and almost had a vanilla/coconut like flavor. The body is a bit weak but I can't wait for this thing to carbonate.