We introduce Redcoat, a web-based annotation tool that supports collaborative hierarchical entity typing. As an annotation tool, Redcoat also facilitates knowledge elicitation by allowing the creation and continuous refinement of concept hierarchies during annotation. It aims to minimise not only annotation time but the time it takes for project creators to set up and distribute projects to annotators. Projects created using the web-based interface can be rapidly distributed to a list of email addresses. Redcoat handles the propagation of documents amongst annotators and automatically scales the annotation workload depending on the number of active annotators. In this paper we discuss these key features and outline Redcoat’s system architecture. We also highlight Redcoat’s unique benefits over existing annotation tools via a qualitative comparison.