Coconut-cacao infused gin is doing two jobs in one bag. The toasted coconut chips are a conventional steep — solids in alcohol, giving up their soluble aromatics. The melted cacao butter is a fat wash, carrying across the fat-soluble compounds nothing else in the bag can reach. Holding both at 65°C for an hour does in one sitting what two separate infusions would take two days to do. It is the base of the Coco-Chaos Negroni.
Why 65 Degrees, and Why Sealed
Heat speeds extraction, and the problem with heating a spirit is that ethanol boils at 78°C. In an open pan you would lose alcohol and the volatile aromatics along with it, and the infusion would come out weaker and duller than it went in. A sealed sous vide bag at 65°C sits comfortably under that threshold and holds the vapour in the bag regardless, so nothing escapes. An hour at that temperature extracts about as much as a week on a countertop.
Toast the coconut chips before they go in. Untoasted coconut gives a flat, milky sweetness; toasting drives Maillard browning and produces the nutty, caramelised note that actually reads as coconut in a stirred drink. Fifty-five grams to three hundred millilitres of gin is a heavy load, and it should be — Campari and sweet vermouth are waiting downstream and they do not yield ground easily.
The Cacao Butter Is the Texture
Cacao butter is the fat pressed out of the cocoa bean, and it carries the bean's aromatics without any of the bitterness or colour that cocoa solids bring. Thirty millilitres of it, melted into the bag, works exactly like the coconut oil in a fat-washed rum: flavour transfers into the spirit, trace lipids stay behind after filtering, and the gin pours with a weight it did not have before. Chocolate on the nose, none of the sugar.
Chill, Freeze, Then Press
Cacao butter sets hard at around 34°C, so this one behaves well: chill the bag, then freeze until the fat is a solid cap. Strain through a fine mesh strainer or cheesecloth and press the coconut chips as you go — they hold a surprising amount of absorbed gin, and leaving it behind costs you a couple of ounces of finished infusion. Keep everything refrigerated while you filter so the cacao butter cannot melt back through.