Help needed, entering homebrew cup for the first time.

Assuming you can taste the coconut, enter it as a fruit beer.

 

If you enter it as a fruit beer both the fruit and the base beer need to be evident. If its lacking fruit flavor, or tastes like the base beer is not a hefe you will get dinged. I entered a fruited wit for judging a few years back, the raspberries were super jammy, but it wasn't obviously a wit. I kept getting honorable mentions until I entered it as an American blonde with raspberries. BOOM! Medals.

 

Spice Herb Vegetable

 

Yeah, I would have assumed that coconut is a nut rather than a fruit (from a cooking / brewing standpoint if not a biological one), and the BJCP classifies nuts under SHV rather than fruit. The other advice above all still seems to apply, though.

 

IIRC, the 2008 guidelines do not mention coconut at all. Botanically, it's a fruit.

 

Did a bit of Googling, found Gordon Strong writing in 2011:
"21a is the right place. I'll clarify in the next set of guidelines. The intent of fruit vs SHV beers is to keep to the culinary interpretation of the ingredient not the botanical one. If (God help us) you made a tomato beer, it would be entered in 21a not 20. Coconut tastes more like macadamia nuts and cashews than it does raspberries and cherries. So it goes in 21. I thought 'nut' was good enough, but apparently not. That was the intent, though."

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=9146

Good pedantry, though. Presumably you'd still enter peanut stout as a vegetable beer since it's technically a legume?

 

Yeah, the guidelines basically say somewheres to ignore the botanical definition and instead apply the culinary standard. Coconut is an in-betweener but falls more to the vegetable side as it's not very sweet (without sugar added).

Makes me wonder if plaintain would be treated as a fruit or as a vegetable. Depends on sweetness & ripeness I suppose. Meanwhile, a green-ass banana wouldn't belong on the fruit side IMO. Let your bananas ripen, dammit.

 

Amen brother . . . it's smart to not declare what style you brewed until you taste it. Judges don't know what you tried to brew, only what's in front of them.

For the OP, there isn't anything wrong with entering it in the two different styles (one entry as base, one entry as SHV or fruit or whatever). Your sacrificing some extra bottles but covering all the bases. FWIW, a Miami homebrew club has an annual competition called the "Coconut Cup", which is next month. They have a special entry for "coconut" beer (category 99) for funsies . . . I've had their Gold Medal'er and it was soaking in flavor from the tropical nut. It tasted what I expect suntan lotion to taste like.

 

Have you used this yeast before to make a hefeweizen? I have made this style and variants (e.g., dunkelweizen) several times with WLP 300 (liquid) and once with Fermentis WB-6 (dry). I did not like the dry yeast version. On the other hand, I once used Fermentis T-58 to ferment a wort made from dry wheat extract and I thought it seemed more credible as a hefeweizen than as something Belgian (which is how T-58 is often described).