flavouring an Apa In demi John

[rich1985]

I'm looking for some help on recipe suggestions. My friend and I are brewing our fifth and final extract brew before Investing in a mash tun and moving to all grain brewing.
We are pretty confident in making a basic, nice tasting APA. We are now looking at flavouring the final batch. We were thinking of making a 20l batch and instead of transferring to a secondary bucket moving to 4 different 4demijohns and flavouring and dry hopping in them. Does this sound feasible or a really laborious task? We were thinking of coconut, peach, mango and one unflavoured. :
We currently have been using late mosaic hop additions (6th for 10mins, 60g for 5 mins, 100 dry hop)and light malt extract. In addition we are steeping 250g caramalt and same of carapils.

My questions are:

Is it really tricky using demijohns as secondaries?
Are there any specific hop combinations that lend themselves to the above flavours?
Should we scrap the idea In its entirety?

 

[Slid]

I'm looking for some help on recipe suggestions. My friend and I are brewing our fifth and final extract brew before Investing in a mash tun and moving to all grain brewing.
We are pretty confident in making a basic, nice tasting APA. We are now looking at flavouring the final batch. We were thinking of making a 20l batch and instead of transferring to a secondary bucket moving to 4 different 4demijohns and flavouring and dry hopping in them. Does this sound feasible or a really laborious task? We were thinking of coconut, peach, mango and one unflavoured. :
We currently have been using late mosaic hop additions (6th for 10mins, 60g for 5 mins, 100 dry hop)and light malt extract. In addition we are steeping 250g caramalt and same of carapils.

My questions are:

Is it really tricky using demijohns as secondaries?
Are there any specific hop combinations that lend themselves to the above flavours?
Should we scrap the idea In its entirety?

I think the idea is good in essence. However, I would suggest adding fruit or vegetation to the beer fairly early on. Between the initial vigorous fermentation and bottling is possibly the best time. That gives time for it to drop out of the finished product.

Having messed around with fruit wines myself in the past, I would definitely put all the processing of fruit pulp, use of pectin destroying enzymes etc at the front end of the process, if possible.

Peach and Mango are great flavours in themselves, but you are going to need a fair amount to make much impact in a heavily hopped APA. Far too much to be practical post racking into a demijohn?

Coconut?. I would eat a bounty bar myself, with said beer.

If you had it in your head that this is what you are doing, you could try adding coconut milk to a finished, strong dark beer. This approach, with cow's milk, is said to be the origin of "Milk Stout".

 

[rich1985]

Thanks for the advice. Think we are just going to make a super strong apa and attempt to add in some mango flavours. We're in it for the long haul so plenty of time to do multiple flavours if we wish @