Brewer: Kona Brewing Company
Location: Kailua-Kona, Hawaii
Type: American Brown Ale
ABV: 5.5%

Ah, Hawaii. It’s such a lovely place and takes such a long time to reach from the East Coast, that I’ve decided to stay a little bit longer. You don’t mind, right?

I’ve also decided to stick with a coconut theme, since it’s such a delightful notion to me, this coconut and beer combination. I’m typically not a big fan of fruit-flavored beers, liking only a select number from the ones I have tried. This, however, works for me, for some completely strange reason. Guess that’s why I was so willing to give another coconut beer a try. This time we’re going from porter to ale with Kona Brewing Company’s KoKo Brown.

Cinnamon oak colors catch light easily through a diaphanous gilding of ecru foam. This is not a heavily carbonated beer by any means. It also possesses a predominantly coconut nose, a strong indication that this time around, coconut will not be sharing its screen time.

To this end, KoKo Brown is a far more divisive flavor than yesterday’s CoCoNuT PorTeR, because it possesses a far more distinct coconut flavor. Whereas yesterday’s brew mixes its toasted coconut with those tried-and-true porter flavors in a practically perfect elixir of cheer, KoKo Brown showcases its coconut center stage. You can smell it in each waft, taste it in each sip, detect it long after the last swallow slips into memory only. For these reasons, I suspect that many will not even consider this as a future beer option. No worries. More for me 😉

I’d like to point out at this point that what I’m tasting in this particular bottle of KoKo Brown is different from what I’ve tasted in previous exposures to this beer. This ale came from my (admittedly small) collection of beers currently being bottle-aged. True, this was a relatively young selection; I’d only been aging it for about a year. However, I can tell you that it was showing delightful progress. One of the things that I noticed when I first tried KoKo Brown was the surprisingly muted status of the flavors. A year served to embolden those flavors, giving this ale a much fuller body and a lush tropical flavor profile.

Actually, this experience has made me once more mourn the fact that Maui Brewing only uses cans for their beers. I can only imagine how amazing a well-aged CoCoNut PorTeR could taste. Diabolically delicious, I’m sure.

Oh, and in case you’re curious about what I’m blathering on about with this whole “bottle aging” hoo ha, here’s a little extra reading material on the subject.

All in all, this is another beer I’m very happy to have discovered, from a decidedly impressive brewer. Even if you choose not to try their KoKo Brown, I’d invite you to give some of their other offerings a try, including their Longboard Lager and an amazing seasonal offering called Pipeline Porter. It’s brewed with Kona coffee. Do I really need to say any more?

And thus the sun descends upon our final moments with Hawaii’s coconut beer offerings. Aloha, denizens, until our next beery destination.