First from-scratch clone: Kona Brewing Koko Brown

This weekend, Beth (@kefishbu1) and I tried brewing a clone of Kona Brewing's Koko Brown. It is my first attempt at trying to clone a recipe from scratch. If you're a homebrewer, and you've gotten beyond using other people's clone recipes, a next step in the process might be attempting to clone from scratch. There's a great article by Chris Colby in Brew Your Own Magazine titled (surprisingly) "How to Clone".

I didn't start out wanting to create a recipe from scratch. I was actually hoping to find one in a forum or in one of my favorite recipe sources. I didn't scour for long, but my first few searches were unproductive, and I soon lost patience. Following some of the advice from Colby's article, and with some help from Beer Tools Pro, I came up with the following:

Koko Brown Clone
All Grain, 75% efficiency
Single-temp infusion, 154F, collect 7.0 gal, with one hour full boil
Grains:
9.25 lb two-row Briess organic
1 lb Victory (R) Malt
1 lb Munich TYPE I Weyermann
0.5 lb Carapills (R)/Carafoam(R) Weyermann
1.5 lb American chocolate
Hops
0.25 oz Warrior (16.0%) 60 min
0.25 oz Millenium (15.5%) 45 min
0.5 oz Cascade (5.5%) 10 min
0.5 oz Willamette (5%) 5 min
Other
1.0 lb flaked organic toasted coconut
Wyeast 1056 American Ale Yeast (I always use a starter of light DME)

Thanks to a lack of hops and the way our local homebrew shops stock different ingredients, I had to modify this some:

All Grain, 75% efficiency
Single-temp infusion, 154F, collect 7.0 gal, with one hour full boil
Grains
9.25 lb two-row Briess organic
1 lb Victory (R) Malt
1 lb Munich TYPE I Weyermann
0.5 lb Carapills (R)/Carafoam(R) Weyermann
1.5 lb American chocolate
Hops
0.27 oz Columbus (15% (for Warrior (16.0%)) 60 min
0.27 oz Chinook (12.5% (for Millenium (15.5%)) 45 min
0.5 oz Cascade (5.5%) 10 min
0.5 oz Willamette (5%) 5 min
0.5 oz Fuggle (4.8%) 5 min [this was actually a mistake; forgot to turn off this ingredient for the printout, but I used it anyway]
Other
1.0 lb flaked organic coconut, toasted
White Labs WLP001 California Ale (in a 1 litre starter)


I toasted the coconut myself, under a broiler turned down to 300F. I put about one pound in a jelly roll pan, and left the door cracked. As the coconut began to turn a golden brown, I rotated the pan 90 degrees. After three rotations, and some re-positioning under the broiler element, I had a nice layer of toasted coconut. I then mixed the coconut and repeated the rotation/mixing process two more times before removing it to a bowl to cool.

Our brew buddy, James, came over and got in on the action. Between us, we made three batches:

• Batch 1: James infused the coconut in the mash
• Batch 2: Beth and I boiled the coconut in the kettle for the last 15 minutes
• Batch 3: We'll make a tea using boiling water and the toasted coconut, and we'll dilute to 2 quarts before pitching in secondary

As I write this, the beers have been fermenting for about 48 hours. I'll do another update as soon as I have beer to taste.