Double IPA Recipe - Suggestions

I'm thinking of brewing this recipe in a couple of weeks and would like to get some community thoughts.
Good bad etc.
Suggestions to improve?
Please let me know.


Ingredients:
0.50 oz Burton Water Salts (Mash 60 min)
1 lbs Rice Hulls (0.0 SRM) (Used for my HERM)
11 lbs Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) 
2 lbs Cara-Pils/Dextrine (2.0 SRM) 
2 lbs Caramel/Crystal Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM) 
1 lbs White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM) 
8.0 oz Honey Malt (25.0 SRM) 
8.0 oz Munich Malt - 10L (10.0 SRM) 
1.0 oz Simcoe [13.0%] - Boil 60 min 
1.0 oz Cascade [5.5%] - Boil 30 min 
1.0 oz Centennial [10.0%] - Boil 30 min 
1.00  Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15 min) 
1.0 oz Cascade [5.5%] - Boil 15 min 
1.0 oz Cascade [5.5%] - Boil 10 min 
1.0 oz Cascade [5.5%] - Boil 5 min 
1.0 oz Centennial [10.0%] - Boil 5 min 
1 pkgs California Ale (White Labs #WLP001) 
1.0 oz Cascade [5.5%] - Dry Hop 12 days 
1.0 oz Centennial [10.0%] - Dry Hop 12 days 
1.0 oz Cascade [5.5%] - Dry Hop 9 days 
1.0 oz Centennial [10.0%] - Dry Hop 6 days 
1.0 oz Cascade [5.5%] - Dry Hop 3 days 

Taste Notes
Hopefully a Double IPA with very complex malt / Hop flavors. A clear/light beer with great head retention.

Notes
Will start dry hopping a couple of days after primary fermentation completes. Then add additional dry hop additions every three days. Keg 3 days after last hop addition to get off hops.

Honey malt is very sweet.  Eight oz seems high, if any at all is needed.  Esp. with 2# of caramel malts.  With 2# caramel, I'd mash pretty low. 

Half oz of Salts is 14 grams, which seems high.  I usually add between 2 and 3 grams of the stuff I use, including gypsum.  Unless you've used that much before, I'd cut that to 4 to 7 grams.  Maybe five grams in mash and two grams in boil to get some calcium in the boil for the hot break too.

Thanks for the reply.
Honey malt I'm still undecided on.
I'm going to mash @ 147f for 1-1/2 to 2 hrs depending on conversion rate. With my HERM its easy to hold it there for as long as needed.
Salts haven't used before. Hoping it will help with the hops to enhanced. I let Beersmith Software pick amount. Still doing some research before determining the amount. Water here is a little hard to start.
Any other suggestions?

Just the salts, esp. if your original water has calcium and sulfates already.  Those prepacked "Burton Salts" are usually not labeled as to what they contain, so I'd go lightly. 

+1 on going easy on the salts if you aren't 100% sure what's in there.

As far as the recipe goes; I might back off on the crystal and dextrine a bit - 2 Lbs of each to 11 Lbs pale malt seems like a lot, IMHO. For a double IPA, the hops are supposed to take center stage, and the malt is merely a supporting character.

Too many different types of malt can go beyond complex and come across as muddy - the malt for a double IPA should be clean. 10L is a good choice for the crystal malt, but I'd limit it to around 5% of the total grain bill. Same goes for the dextrine - I'd keep that around half a pound to a pound max.

Your hops look fantastic! Just remember that as OG goes up, hop utilization goes down - I learned this the hard way on my first double IPA.

philm63 said:

Just remember that as OG goes up, hop utilization goes down - I learned this the hard way on my first double IPA.

Click to expand...

Interesting! Struggled somewhat with my planned IBU in my last IPA. Couldn't explain why it felled less bitter than planned.
Do you know to what extend this happens?

Looking back at my last attempt at a double IPA my OG was 1.087 with 107.1 IBUs (Tinseth) and a 1.230 BU/GU as calculated in BeerSmith. 

Looking at my latest regular(single?) IPA my OG was 1.074 with 88.9 IBUs and a BU/GU of 1.209.

When finished, the double IPA came in at 8.8% ABV and had very little, almost absent bitterness - way too low for my pallet.

Conversely; the latest batch of my regular IPA finished at 7.6% ABV and has a fantastic hop aroma and good fruity hop flavor up front with a firm bitterness - excellent, IMHO.

I do not know where the curves might fall on a graph, nor do I know the exact mechanisms at work here, but I do know that the amount of sugar in solution affects the isomerization of the alpha acids. Just look at the tasting notes on each of my brews here and compare the OG, IBUs, and BU/GU of each.

@philm63
Thanks, I will keep this in mind.
R, Slurk