So the other day I was browsing through my favorite Facebook group, Honest Craft Beer Reviews, when I saw somebody talking about a pretty cool beer: Maui CoCoNut Porter. It’s a porter brewed on the Hawaiian island of Maui with genuine coconut. I do so love coconut, so this immediately became a must try beer for me. Of course, I took a look around the local beer superstores to see if it had made its way to Georgia: it hadn’t.

No worries, I thought to myself, I’ll see it in these parts soon enough. And perhaps I will. Until that time, though, I lodged the notion of coconut beer, as intriguing as it was, safely in the back of my brain. A few weeks later, I found myself at my local Taco Mac (also an establishment bereft of Maui Brewing beer). They did have Hawaiian beer, though, newly arrived in fact: Kona Koko Brown Ale. At least it could be Hawaiian beer, since Kona contract brews its bottled beers to Redhook-Widmer. I am not sure if they do the same for draft product.

Anyway, thinking I had already had a brown ale from Kona, I passed on it and ordered up a mug of Victory Tettnang Pils. That was a good choice as a starter beer, and the spicy hops went very well with the slightly spicy chips, salsa, and veggie quesadillas I feasted upon.  Something about the Koko Brown kept it in my thoughts, though, and so I whipped out my trusty Kindle Fire and Binged it. What’s this? A brown ale brewed with COCONUT? Truly, both Ninkasi and the coconut gods were smiling upon me this day.

Of course I ordered a mug. Koko brown is named after Hawaii’s Koko crater. It is the brewery's winter and Spring seasonal brew. Koko Brown has the following specs according to Kona Brewing:

Bitterness: 28 IBU

Alcohol by Volume: 5.5%

Original Gravity: 13.3 P

Malts: Premium 2-Row, Victory, Carapilis, munich, Chocolate

Hops: CASCADE, WILLAMETTE, Warrior, Millennium

And, of course, it’s made with toasted coconut.

My mug of Kona Koko Brown Ale arrived light brown in color with a thick creamy tan head formation and a soft, nutty chocolate nose. Taking a sip, I found the palate hinting at light cocoa laced with a tad of the nuttiness the nose had implied. And then there’s the soft toasted cocoa-it gently pushes its way through the malt sweetness and accents the cocoa quite perfectly. You can definitely tell there’s coconut in this beer, and the way it accents the chocolate reminds one of sipping on a Mounds bar.

All in all, nicely done, perhaps on the lighter side but this is a brown ale after all and I think that the coconut might be drowned out in a bigger beer. There’s even a very subtle grassy hop bitterness in the finish to balance a bit. At $6.25 a pint, it was reasonably priced, and certainly a beer I would buy again.

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